June Week
by Alchemine
Summary: Opening the Chamber of Secrets is not the only crime Tom Riddle commits as a Hogwarts student. But can young Minerva McGonagall prove his guilt? Also features Dumbledore and others. Complete.
1. Secrets And Spies

**Disclaimer: **

This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

**I: Secrets And Spies**

_Discuss the impact of magic on the reign of Elizabeth Tudor (1533-1603). In what ways did she use magic to better the lot of her people and bolster her political status? How did she influence popular attitudes about magic? How did she address accusations that she herself was a witch, and which of her advisers knew that the accusations were, in fact, true? Use at least three supporting examples from lecture notes and text for each point._

Minerva McGonagall sat in the Hogwarts library, struggling to keep her attention on the open History of Magic book in front of her. For the last week, she'd been working obsessively and sleeping perhaps three hours a night, and it was beginning to catch up to her. She felt slow and stupid with fatigue -- even the simplest tasks, like lacing her boots or writing her name, seemed to take forever. All her meals tasted like ashes, and earlier that morning, she'd nearly been overcome by a vast grey wave of drowsiness that had risen up out of nowhere and threatened to fell her right where she stood. She'd had to stop in the corridor and lean against a wall while she fought it off.

Three more days to go till the N.E.W.T.s. They were killing her. She needed to do well even more urgently than most of the other seventh-years -- she'd run through the small amount of money her father had left her, and would have to find work somewhere the instant she finished school. If she muffed these exams, she would be serving butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks, not teaching or working for the Ministry. She'd have little choice, though; after seven years of spending alternating summer and winter holidays with her cousins in Aberdeen and her half-senile uncle in Carrickfergus, she felt she'd worn out her welcome everywhere she had relatives. Professor Dumbledore would be willing to help her, but she just couldn't bear to accept any more assistance from him. He'd been slipping her pocket money for a few months now, which was bad enough. She felt smaller and guiltier with every coin that passed from his hands to hers.

Topping it all off, of course, was the fact that N.E.W.T.s for Hogwarts students had been postponed this year. If it weren't for the wretched Chamber of Secrets, the exams would already be behind her. Well, she had no right to complain about that. She'd survived the incident, not like that poor second-year girl.

Her head was growing terribly heavy. She propped her chin on her hands to relieve a little of the weight. A few more pages and she'd take a break, maybe lie down for a while -

Just as she was starting to doze off, she felt a sharp tug at the back of her head, and her hair fell forward over her shoulders, half-covering her face.

"What the -- " She jerked upright and turned in her chair. "Oh, it's you."

"I live for your enthusiastic greetings, Minerva." Tom Riddle was standing behind her, silhouetted against the light from the library windows, holding the red tartan ribbon he'd just yanked from her hair. "Sorry. That bow of yours was crying out to be pulled."

"May I have it back, please?" she asked icily, holding out her hand.

"In a minute," he said. He walked around her and leaned against the edge of her table, casting a lazy gaze across the books and notes she'd spread out. "What are you doing?"

"I'm revising for exams, what does it look like I'm doing? It's been hard to concentrate lately with everything that's been going on."

"Oh, yes. The unpleasantness."

"You could call it that," Minerva said. She eyed him with distaste. Brilliant student, newly anointed school hero and guaranteed future Head Boy he might be, but she didn't like him and never had. Not that she didn't think he'd done the right thing in reporting Hagrid -- she would have done the same if she'd been the one to find out about the creature. She couldn't explain why she felt so uneasy regarding the whole affair, or what it was about Tom's "I did it for Hogwarts" speeches that rang false to her. All she knew was that she would go to almost any lengths to avoid sitting next to him in the prefects' meetings.

Maybe, she thought, she just felt sorry for Hagrid. The two of them weren't close, of course. Hagrid was four years behind her, and at Hogwarts, that was like living on alternate planes of reality. She'd got to know him a bit the previous year, though, when his father had died and she'd tried to comfort him -- she could still remember how embarrassed she'd been, sitting there on the common room sofa with him clasping her against his chest and weeping massive tears onto the top of her head. They'd talked enough for her to realize that there wasn't a trace of maliciousness in him. When she'd told him her own story of being orphaned, he'd turned the tables and attempted, clumsily, to comfort _her_.

She knew Hagrid had deserved punishment for what he'd done. Probably even the expulsion he'd received. Still, she was glad that Professor Dumbledore had managed to get him the assistant gamekeeper's job. It was too horrible to think of a boy his age being thrown out into the world with nowhere to go. At least she'd had a house to live in when she'd lost her father -- a house which, unfortunately, had been sold to help pay for her schooling.

_You didn't seem to care what happened to Hagrid_, she thought sourly as she studied Tom. He was busy riffling the pages of one of her books with his thin, pale fingers, smiling as if seventh-year work was too simpleminded for him. In his free hand, he still held her hair ribbon hostage.

"Tom ..." She looked pointedly at the ribbon, and he laughed.

"Oh, Minerva, don't be such a prune! I said in a minute." He sat down in the chair beside her and gestured to her work. "So how are you getting along? Is it worse than studying for the O.W.L.s?"

"You have no idea," Minerva said. "If I were you, I'd start now. Two years isn't as long as you think."

Tom crossed one leg over the opposite knee and regarded her, playing idly with her ribbon. "And what do you plan to do with all the N.E.W.T.s you're sure to get?" The red material fluttered in his hand. He wound it around his fingers one way, then the other.

She shrugged. "Teach, probably. It's what I've always wanted to do."

"Mmmmm. Sounds a bit dull, though, don't you think?"

"Not to me," she said. "Why, what are you planning to do after school, take over the world? Isn't that every Slytherin's dearest ambition?"

His smile widened. "I had no idea you knew me so well, Minerva." Then he laughed again at her severe expression. "I'm only joking! Well, I'll leave you to your work. Good luck on the exams, if I don't see you again before then." Standing up, he made to leave.

"Do you _mind_? I'd really like to have my ribbon back," she hissed after him.

He stopped and looked down at it.

"No ..." he said slowly. "No, I think I'll keep it. You've read those old stories about knights, haven't you? Ladies were always giving them their ribbons as tokens, right before the knights went off to fight in the wars."

_Is it worth it to argue_? Minerva wondered. _Oh, who cares? I have a drawer full of them, and at least he's going away now._

"Suit yourself," she said aloud. "Much luck may it bring you."

"I think it will," said Tom. "Yes, I definitely think so."

She listened to the click of his boot heels fading away down the length of the library and into the outer corridor. When she was sure he had gone, she started to gather up her things. It was definitely time for that break. He'd left her with the beginnings of a fine headache.

If anyone had asked, Albus Dumbledore would have staunchly denied that he was set in his ways. That was for old men, and although he was approaching the century mark, he still thought of himself in the same way he had when he was twenty. He put a great deal of effort into maintaining his image as an unpredictable free spirit. But he had to admit he enjoyed one routine - his afternoon walk around the grounds. Even when the weather was wet or cold, the walk calmed him and put him in the right frame of mind for a peaceful evening.

On an early-summer day like this one, it was sheer delight. He stepped through the great twin doors of the castle, sniffed the warm, heady air appreciatively, and set off.

As he neared the lake, he saw a black-robed figure sitting on the dock, feet prudently drawn up out of the giant squid's reach. A heap of flat stones lay next to the figure, which was trying, without much success, to skip them across the dark water of the lake.

Dumbledore smiled and went down to see his favorite student.

"Lovely day, isn't it?" he said to her back.

Minerva shrugged, flinging a stone that hit the water and sank immediately. Her silence, and the rigid set of her shoulders, said she wanted to be left alone. Ignoring the message, Dumbledore sat down next to her, picked up one of her stones and pretended to examine it while watching her from the corner of his eye. When she still hadn't said anything after a few minutes, he decided it was time to prod her a little. He flicked the stone toward the lake with an expert snap of his wrist, and watched in satisfaction as it took two long hops and one short hop, then shot up into the air, did a triple loop-the-loop, plunged, and disappeared without a splash.

"Show-off," Minerva said, turning to face him for the first time. "You used magic!"

"I did nothing of the kind," Dumbledore replied with mock indignation. "I'll have you know that I won the All-England Stone-Skipping Competition three years in a row when I was a boy."

"Yes, the All-England Magical Stone-Skipping Competition," retorted Minerva. The look she shot him started as a scowl, but then melted into a reluctant grin.

_Got you_, Dumbledore thought in satisfaction. He prided himself on being one of the few people who could coax a smile out of her.

"Your insolence knows no bounds, Miss McGonagall," he said, grinning back to show he wasn't serious. "Perhaps I should take some points away from Gryffindor for your cheek."

"It's a bit late in the year for that."

"The Leaving Feast is not until Saturday. I have plenty of time to teach you a final lesson or two."

Minerva's face twisted into an almost comical expression of disgust. "Please, no more lessons. My head will explode if I stuff one more thing into it. I intend to forget everything I've learned the minute the N.E.W.T.s are over."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Dumbledore said. "You'll need it all next autumn."

"Next autumn?" asked Minerva. "Do you know something I don't?"

"My dear girl, I know countless things you don't. One of them is that Headmaster Dippet intends to offer you a position at Hogwarts."

"He does! But I haven't even taken my exams yet ..."

"Your qualifications are not in question," he said. "And it isn't a full professorship. You will be assisting me, teaching some of my first- and second-year classes, and filling in occasionally for teachers in your other strong subjects. Those would be Potions and Defense Against The Dark Arts, correct?"

She nodded. "Not Herbology, though. Plants lie down and die when they see me coming."

"Not Herbology," he agreed. "Of course, it all depends on whether you want to take the position. Do you?"

"What sort of question is that? You know very well I do."

"Good," said Dumbledore. "Be sure to act surprised when Headmaster Dippet speaks to you about it. He will be most unhappy if he knows I let anything slip."

Minerva nodded again, visibly trying to force her delighted, embarrassed expression into something more befitting a newly appointed teacher. Dumbledore found this display of adolescent dignity quite amusing, but out of respect for it, he refrained from patting her on the head the way he normally would have. Instead, he caught hold of a lock of her hair and gave it an affectionate pull.

"I've enjoyed teaching you, Minerva. I'm sure I'll enjoy working with you as well. What have you done to your hair today, by the way? I hardly knew it was you without the traditional McGonagall bow."

"Tom Riddle nicked my hair ribbon," said Minerva, frowning suddenly as if remembering an unpleasant encounter. "He's probably using it to tie up his fan letters by now. Really, I know he did a wonderful thing and all, but I think the attention is starting to go to his head. He's even worse than usual. Why are you looking at me that way?"

"Oh, no reason," he said. There wasn't any point in upsetting her with his suspicions about the Riddle boy ... but it couldn't hurt to dig for a little information, could it?

"How well do you know Tom?" he asked.

"Not very well, and even that's more than I'd like," she said. "He gives me chills. Not that that's strange, for a Slytherin, but he's odder than the rest of the lot. No one else seems to think so, though."

"Hmmmm," Dumbledore said. He looked out at the lake for a moment, wondering if it were quite appropriate to ask for her help. He'd already tried to launch a thorough, formal investigation into the events of last week. Dippet had refused to hear of it, though. The other man wanted the whole affair to go away as quickly as possible. Dumbledore couldn't find it in his heart to blame him too much - he wanted the same thing - and yet the situation kept bothering him. He'd sat up most of the previous night stewing over it.

At last he decided to go ahead. She would be pleased to be asked, and very likely there was nothing untoward to discover anyway. He was only being cautious.

"Minerva, do you suppose you might do a favor for me?" he asked.

"Of course," she said immediately.

"Would you just keep an eye on Tom? Don't say anything to anyone about it. I really haven't any reason to distrust him. Perhaps it's nothing ... but would you tell me if he does anything out of the ordinary? You are in a better position to watch him than I."

"Yes, absolutely."

"Good girl," he said. He stood up and offered her a hand. "Come, let's walk back to the castle together. It's almost time for dinner, and I'm sure you have more work to do afterward."

"That," said Minerva, letting him pull her to her feet, "is the understatement of the year."

The following days brought few opportunities for Minerva to observe her quarry -- with Tom in his exams and she in her own, their paths rarely crossed. But she had promised Dumbledore, and so she took careful note every time she did glimpse Tom in the halls. He was always with his group of Slytherin cronies, and he never seemed to be doing anything suspicious.

She did notice, to her surprise and annoyance, that he still had that damned hair ribbon, now tied around the strap of his battered old book satchel like a trophy. On one occasion, he caught her gaze, pointed to it and flashed a thin smile. It quite unnerved her. Why hadn't he just thrown the silly thing away? Perhaps she'd be able to get it back at the prefects' end-of-year dinner, which was the night before the Leaving Feast. She hoped so. At the time, letting him take it had seemed like the easy thing to do, but the longer he kept it, the more she realized she didn't like him having something of hers, especially if he was going to flaunt it at her this way.

_Don't be a dolt_, she scolded herself, watching him from across the hall. _He's just doing it to tease you. He's only a kid, really, no matter how creepy he is. What could he possibly do with a hair ribbon?_

What could he do?


	2. Memory Lapse

Author's Note: This chapter contains references to rape. There are no graphic descriptions, but if rape disturbs you, please stop now. I really wasn't planning to include this kind of content when I started out, but as soon as I let Tom Riddle into my story, it just happened. Blame it on his evil influence.

** II: Memory Lapse **

_Wake up! What's wrong with you?_

Sugar flapped around the seventh-year Gryffindor girls' dormitory agitatedly. He'd woken hours earlier than usual, in full daylight, with a strange feeling of disquiet. It had taken him a while to work out what was the matter: the girl hadn't come to visit him the night before. Ever since the old man had given him to her (well, "given" was a generous term -- in truth, Sugar had decided he simply preferred her company, and the old man had yielded to his wishes), she had stopped at the Owlery every evening to indulge him with treats and caresses. She was a creature of habit, like Sugar himself, and he couldn't imagine what would have made her deviate from their usual routine.

He'd told himself that he was going to the dormitory to peck her in retribution. But he had been worried, as much as an owl ever was, and had grown even more worried when he'd flown through the window and found her still asleep at nearly noon, lying fully dressed on top of her bed and positioned at a very awkward angle. To Sugar's sharp eyes, it looked as if she had fallen there, not as if she'd lain down to rest. And he couldn't wake her, no matter how he screeched and beat at her with his wings.

_Wake up, girl! Minerva! Wake up, WAKE UP!_

Brightness and heat. Those were the first things she was aware of. Then pain, mostly in her head, but in other parts of her body too. And finally nausea; horrible, gripping nausea that made her dry-heave before she even opened her eyes.

When she did open them, the feeling of disconnection was so strong she could hardly focus. She was in her room, on her bed, with brilliant summer sunlight falling on her. But an instant before, she'd been walking up the staircase to Gryffindor Tower, on her way back from the prefects' dinner. And it had been night. Late at night.

She put both hands to her aching head and tried to think. The group had finished dinner ... a few of them had stood round and talked for a while ... and then she'd said good night and left. Then -

The transition from there to here was like a flicker in her mind, with no memory of darkness or unconsciousness. She played the sequence over and over, trying to capture anything that would tell her what had happened. Dinner. Talking. Walking away. Here. In between, there was nothing.

Sugar landed on her bed almost weightlessly and stared at her, his golden eyes as wide as they could go.

"How did I get here?" she asked him. "Did you see?"

_No. I wasn't here. You're hurt; I smell blood on you. You need help._ He shifted restlessly from foot to foot.

Minerva struggled up into a sitting position and gagged again, crossing both arms tightly over her stomach. She looked around the empty dormitory. Everyone had probably gone to Hogsmeade for some last-minute shopping, as it was Saturday. It wasn't surprising that they hadn't woken her. They wouldn't have dared. She was notorious for being irritable in the morning.

Even if she'd been a morning person normally, she wouldn't have been one now. She rarely drank anything stronger than butterbeer, and knew she hadn't done so last night - but despite that, she felt exactly as if she had a very nasty hangover. Except that in addition to the sickness, she ached everywhere. And, she realized, sliding off the bed, there was a dreadful raw pain between her legs, as if - as if what? What could she have possibly done to hurt herself there?

_Maybe you didn't do anything,_ said a small voice in her head. _Maybe something was done to you._

_No. Impossible,_ she thought.

_You'd better make sure of that,_ said the voice implacably.

Hunched over and trembling with shock and fear, she made her way to the bathroom and investigated. It was true. She was spotted with dried blood - not much, but enough - and traces of another, horribly _organic_ substance, which she'd never seen firsthand before, but recognized nonetheless. All the strength she had summoned up to get there ran out of her like a spilled potion, and she slid down to sit on the cold tile floor.

_Rape_. Even thinking the word made her wince. She tried to distance herself from it by dwelling not on the what, but on the how, by puzzling the logistics out as if this were a difficult classroom exercise.

There were certainly compounds that could render a person incapacitated, and even affect memory. She'd heard scare stories last year about girls in Hogsmeade being drugged and assaulted, left to wander the streets not knowing what had happened to them. So it was possible that someone could have tampered with her food or drink. How that someone (or someones - but she didn't want to consider that possibility) had returned her to her dormitory without anyone noticing was a problem to ponder later.

The last time she'd eaten or drunk anything was at the prefects' dinner. Whatever had happened, it had started there. She considered who might have done such a thing, and the image of pale, smiling Tom Riddle - Tom with her stolen hair ribbon still tied to his bag - immediately leapt into her mind.

_He wouldn't. He couldn't. He's only a fifth-year, practically a child. And to do it now, when everyone's attention is on him, when he's still the hero - it would be mad._

But that was just it. Tom _was_ a bit mad. No one seemed to realize it but her, and Professor Dumbledore, but there it was.

Dumbledore. She would have to go to Dumbledore. He'd asked her to report anything suspicious that Tom did, but she was sure he'd never imagined something like this happening. The idea of telling him - of telling anyone - was terrible, but she couldn't keep it a secret.

_Wait._ That little voice was back again. _You don't have any proof that it was Tom. You don't even know what really happened._

_I know what didn't happen! _she thought back indignantly. _I didn't leave the dinner and suddenly decide to lose my virginity with the first person I met in the halls. And I didn't drug myself, either! And Tom took my ribbon ..._

The ribbon proves nothing. After all, you said he could take it. And you weren't walking with him when you left last night, were you?

She strained to remember. No, she hadn't been walking with anyone. But that didn't matter. Professor Dumbledore could find out what had happened. He could use Veritaserum -

_You know better. It's not that easy. He can't just run around using Veritaserum whenever it suits him. He'd have to get permission from the Ministry. That means he'd have to go to the Headmaster first, and Dippet thinks the heather blooms wherever Tom Riddle walks. Dumbledore would believe you without question, but would Dippet? Would anyone else? Or would they think you were just trying to bring the hero down?_

"I don't know," she moaned. Her voice echoed hollowly off the tile walls of the bathroom. "I don't know what to do!" Surely she had already misjudged once, somewhere in that blank black period of time; had made a mistake that had allowed someone to get the better of her. What if she made another one now? How could she tell what was right when she felt so ill? 

Until yesterday, she would have had a ready answer: report it, and let the professors handle it. If another student had come to her and told the same story, she would have insisted on doing so. Somehow it all seemed different when the troubles were happening to her instead of someone else.

_Here's what you can do. You know now that you'll be working here next year, and Tom will still be a student. So do what Dumbledore asked you to and keep watching him. And if you catch him out at anything, anything at all, then you can talk. Then you can ask for the Veritaserum - there's no time limit, it'll work as well ten years from now as it would today. Just be careful, and make sure he doesn't get the chance to try this on anyone else. You can do it._

It seemed a poor compromise, but what other choice was there?

Minerva rubbed both hands hard across her eyes and stood up, swaying a little as another burst of sickness hit her. Her horror at having been attacked was still there, but fury at her attacker was beginning to grow alongside it. She welcomed the feeling in all its familiarity. The infamous McGonagall temper had carried her through many a humiliation. It could get her through this one.

_Hold that thought_, she told herself, and turned on the hot-water tap full blast to wash the evidence away.


	3. Monster In Training

**Disclaimer**: The usual.

**Chapter 3**: Monster In Training 

At the beginning of his fourth year at Hogwarts, Tom Riddle had learned how to make Lethe potion, and a world of possibilities had opened up to him. 

Lethe was really quite amazing, like a liquid form of the Obliviate charm, but easier to use. When you used Obliviate, you had to worry about replacing the memory you'd removed with another one. It was tricky, and didn't always work like you intended it to. With Lethe, you just administered a few drops to your intended target. The person was aware while the potion was active, but weakened and disoriented. When it wore off, all memory of what had happened since the potion began to work had disappeared.

Armed with this useful tool, Tom and some of his more intimate friends became the secret terrors of Hogsmeade, the local village, for several months. Every time they were given permission to go to Hogsmeade on a Saturday, they chose a girl - sometimes an attractive one, but sometimes just an available one - and offered to buy her a drink. A few Lethe-laced sips later, their new friend would be ready to follow anywhere they led. They would take her to a private place, where she would be completely at their disposal for an hour or so. Then they would turn her loose to find her own way home.

It was a delightful pastime for them, though not for the girls, and as such, it was too good to last. As rumors about their activities spread around the village, parents started warning their daughters to beware of men and boys, and girls became very suspicious of anyone who even approached to talk. By the time school broke up for the summer, they had to abandon their sport or risk being caught.

Tom hadn't dared to use Lethe with any of the girls he knew at Hogwarts, but he knew just who he'd like to try it on: Minerva McGonagall, who was one of the Gryffindor prefects, two years ahead of him and a dreadful annoyance. She was clever, and pretty, and ever so high-minded and serious about her responsibilities – just the sort of person who needed to be taken down a notch for her own good. She was also an orphan, as Tom was, but she'd known her parents, as he never had. And unlike him, she had someone who cared for her – Professor Dumbledore, the Transfiguration teacher. Dumbledore was her legal guardian, though she didn't live with him in the summers. You could tell he was as proud of her as could be – it was all over his face every time he looked at her – and he petted and spoiled her enough to make anyone sick. Outside the classroom, at least. According to the seventh-year Slytherins, he was careful to treat her the same as everyone else during lessons.

No one had ever taken such pleasure in Tom's accomplishments. He earned house points and awards galore, and his teachers thought him very brave for striving to overcome the unfortunate circumstances of his early life, but their approval was professional, detached. There was none of the personal connection he craved.

Minerva had that from Dumbledore in spades. Tom hated seeing them together, her dark head tipped up attentively to listen to her mentor's supposed words of wisdom, his hand resting on her back or shoulder in gentle affection. What had she done to merit that sort of closeness? What made her any more deserving than Tom himself?

Of course, her relationship with Dumbledore made Tom's plans for her more problematic, and riskier. The old man already disliked him, and if he found out that Tom had laid so much as a finger on his princess, he would ruin him for sure. So Tom waited, and carried on with his other covert activities – getting hold of one girl, however insufferable she might be, was only secondary to his main ambition. 

His fifth year progressed, and he saw more and more of Minerva, as they were both prefects now. Just as he began to think that she was going to graduate and slip out of his reach forever, the Chamber of Secrets crisis erupted, and in his effort to save his own hide, he inadvertently became the school hero. Now people were on his side, now they thought well of him. Too well to believe that he would do anything unpleasant. 

This was his opportunity, and he seized it. Slipping a little Lethe into Minerva's cup at the prefects' end-of-year dinner was easy. He'd had plenty of practice at it the previous year. After that, he had to leave things up to chance somewhat – he had a spell he could use to get her back to her dormitory unobserved later, but he couldn't cast it in front of witnesses. Nor could he risk being seen alone with her.

Fortunately for him, everything went as smoothly as if he'd planned it step by step, as if he'd finally captured the luck that had eluded him at his birth. Minerva stayed talking to a few people after dinner until the other Gryffindors had already gone back to their tower and the potion began to do its work. Then it was simply a matter of catching up to her as she walked away and whisking her off into a disused room he'd selected beforehand. 

He'd shared the Hogsmeade girls with his friends, but this was different. Minerva was a special treat for him alone. He knew he'd only have a short time with her, and was determined to make the most of it. And make the most of it he did. The experience was the most exciting he'd ever had, both because of who she was and because they were inside Hogwarts, bastion of rules and regulations, where such things were definitely not allowed. Her fright and confusion added an extra layer of enjoyment for him – not a trace of the prim, arrogantly self-confident Minerva he knew was in sight to spoil the moment. 

She turned out to be a virgin, which didn't surprise him. Girls like her always were. He expected she'd been saving herself for her true love, or some such nonsense. Or perhaps she was nursing an unrequited passion for Dumbledore. Either way, he put an end to that right off. It was almost a pity she wouldn't remember any of it; he'd really been far kinder to her than he could have been, considering the circumstances. He suspected he'd given her too much of the potion for her health, though. People weren't meant to lose consciousness completely from it. Oh well, there was nothing he could do about that now.

After their little tryst was over and he'd sent her reeling on her way, he went back to his own dormitory and stretched out on his bed, lazily replaying the evening in his mind and trying to decide what had been the best part. He finally concluded that it had been having the opportunity to get his hands into that lovely hair of hers. He'd been looking at it for years and wondering if it felt like the black silk it resembled. Now he knew it did. In fact, it had been so pleasant to the touch that he'd taken a bit for himself.

He pulled it out of his pocket -- a long lock he'd snipped from underneath the main mass, where she'd never notice it was missing -- and stroked it contemplatively with one finger. If he took this back to the orphanage with him for the summer, he thought, it would almost be as if she were there too, as if she had to share part of his suffering. It would serve her right.

From his other pocket, he took the red tartan ribbon he'd gotten off her in the library earlier in the week. He coiled the lock of hair neatly and tied it with the ribbon for safekeeping. Then he tucked it under his pillow, rolled over, and fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.


	4. Surcease From Sorrow

**Chapter 4**: Surcease From Sorrow

It was strange, Minerva reflected, how her Hogwarts education had taught her so much and so little at the same time. She'd learned how to mix potions and draw up star charts and change furniture into animals. Still, she kept discovering other, equally important things that no one had bothered to tell her – such as just how far-reaching the implications of a single act could be. 

Take her misadventure at the hands of Tom Riddle, for example. It had affected her in all the ways one would expect from such an event. But it had also led to some unpredictable changes.

One of those was the way it had altered her relationship with Professor Dumbledore. Ever since she'd gotten past her initial suspicion of him on the day they'd met, she'd trusted the professor as deeply as anyone could trust anyone. Her own father, though he'd loved and protected her, had been too wrapped up in his work and his private eccentricities to pay her much attention. Dumbledore, in contrast, always made time for her, always wanted to know what was happening in her life, always had words of genuine praise for her. Even after she'd turned eighteen and technically been on her own, he'd given her advice and support. She couldn't have asked for a better, kinder man to oversee her affairs.

Now, in the months following The Incident, as she had come to think of it, her fondness for her mentor had developed into an infatuation so intense it was almost painful. She was a smart girl, and it wasn't hard for her to pick out the psychological issues fueling her feelings. She was wary of boys her own age at the moment. If one could attack her, might others not also? But she was still human, and young, and wanted someone to love - and Professor Dumbledore, whom she knew would cut off his own hands before he would hurt her, was a safe target for that love. So she lavished all her affection on him, in part openly, in part secretly.

It was a chaste love, really, and the fantasies that accompanied it were chaste as well, adolescent dreams of kissing and embracing, of sleeping warm and safe at his side where no one could touch her. The thought of greater intimacy made her insides seize up with fear. She knew, intellectually, that her next sexual experience was not likely to be as traumatic as the first had been, but the prospect was still alarming. Sometimes she sat alone in her room and fretted over it. What if her hopes were realized and Professor Dumbledore came to love her as she loved him? He would surely want that from her then. What would she do? How could she refuse?

_Albus_, she reminded herself, _you're supposed to call him Albus now._ He'd told her so at the beginning of the school year, saying that since they were colleagues, they should be on a first-name basis. She still felt herself turning red every time she addressed him that way, but it was getting easier.

At least _something_ was improving for her. Though she didn't have to teach any of Tom's classes -- he was a sixth-year now, and she was only handling the first-years -- she still saw him often enough to keep The Incident constantly at the front of her mind. Falling asleep at night was nearly impossible, despite all the extra protective spells she'd put on her door; she couldn't shake the worry that she would wake up in a different place with another chunk of her memory missing. Often it was close to dawn before she finally drifted off, and even then her sleep was thin and restless. The resulting exhaustion made it very difficult for her to manage the duties of her new job, not to mention her private mission of finding dirt she could use against her attacker.

There was another thing that wasn't going well. Now that she was part of the staff, she had more freedom to move around the castle, but she still couldn't go prowling after hours without an excuse ready in case someone asked. Nor could she get inside the Slytherin dormitories -- and even if she could have, she wasn't sure she would have. Gryffindor bravery or no, it was foolhardy to walk into a snake's den, so to speak. She was not about to be violated a second time if she could help it, even if it meant getting the evidence she needed.

And wasn't violation the crux of her problem? As far as she could tell, the rape itself hadn't been too bad, as such things went. After a day or two of discomfort, her physical injuries had healed, but that violated feeling just wouldn't go away. She felt branded by it, as if "VICTIM" were written in large, glowing letters on her forehead. And there was Tom every day in the Great Hall, eating and talking and smiling his chilly smile, just as if nothing had ever passed between them. Clearly _he_ wasn't affected. 

_Maybe it wasn't really him. Maybe it was someone else. Maybe you're going mad, and rape hallucinations are the first symptom._

No. Minerva trusted her own judgment more than that. She knew what had happened to her, and she knew who had done it, knew by the way she instinctively stiffened and drew in on herself every time he was near. Her body remembered, even if her mind could not. All she had to do was prove it. But how?

All this stress roiling around in her head took its toll on her, and soon enough, Dumbledore noticed that something was wrong. Just before the Christmas holidays, he started asking her questions - gentle questions, but probing ones that were difficult to sidestep. It didn't help that she wanted to answer him truthfully, to unload the problem onto him and let him solve it. Instead, she told him that she was having trouble with the adjustment to teaching, and he seemed to believe her (though you never could tell precisely what was going on behind the twinkling eyes and jovial expression).

"Perhaps it would do you good to get out of the castle for a day," he mused. They were in his office, which was now her office too, at least until she earned a full teaching appointment and got one of her own. "You could go into Hogsmeade next time the students go -"

"No!" Minerva said, so sharply that he glanced at her in surprise. "I mean, no, thank you, I'd rather not. I've been there plenty of times." 

"True, true," Dumbledore said. "But still, I think a break is in order. Ah, I know! I'll be going into London next Saturday to take care of some business. How would you like to go along with me? You could look around in Diagon Alley while I'm occupied, and then we could have an early dinner together before coming back. What do you think?"

What did she think? A whole day miles away from Tom and everything to do with him? Dinner alone with Dumbledore -- with _Albus_? No need to ponder that one!

"I would love to," she said. "But are you sure it's quite safe? With the Muggle war and all?"

"They're having blackouts at night, and some hit-and-run air raids," Dumbledore said, "but not much is going on during the day at the moment. The Muggles seem to be going about their business as usual, even if they have to climb over heaps of rubble to do it. Anyway, there are spells on Diagon Alley for protection. I don't foresee any trouble. Really, Minerva, do you think I'd take you there if I thought it were dangerous?"

"No, of course not," she said, smiling in spite of herself. He smiled back and patted the top of her head.

"I do miss the ribbons," he said. "I suppose you're too grown-up now to wear them anymore."

"Right," Minerva said. She'd stopped doing her hair with ribbons months ago -- they made her look too young to be teaching, and there were too many unpleasant memories associated with them. Lately she'd been scraping it all back into a bun. It was a much more professorial style. Her temples ached at the end of the day from the pulling, but she figured she'd get used to that in time.

"Well, growing up does happen to the best of us," said Dumbledore with another smile. "Why don't you meet me here after breakfast on Saturday? My appointment's at ten; that should give me plenty of time to drop you off in Diagon Alley. I think you'll enjoy yourself."

"I plan to," Minerva said. "Believe me, I do."

And she did. Dumbledore left her just inside the entrance to Diagon Alley with a promise to rejoin her at three o'clock, and she spent several pleasant hours roaming around. She'd never been much of a recreational shopper - she'd had to be terribly tight with her money while she was a student, and it had always seemed silly to waste time gaping at things she couldn't buy - but now she could enjoy looking in the various shops and making mental lists of what she would come back for later in the day and what she would have to save up for. She ate walnut fudge and petted the exotic creatures in the animal shop, and finally, around one o'clock, ended up in Flourish and Blotts. 

The familiar smell of parchment, vellum, rag paper and leather washed over her as soon as she stepped inside, reminding her, as it always did, of her father's vast collection of books both Muggle and magical. Their whole house had been permeated by that scent, with undertones of pipe smoke and brewing potions. One sniff was enough to make her feel warm and snug and cared-for, despite the chill coming from the door behind her. 

She moved slowly up and down the aisles, choosing a copy of _Great Expectations_ and one of _Magical History Of The Scottish Highlands _(that last largely because she'd been thinking of her father, who'd had more national pride than William Wallace himself). Then she headed over to the Transfiguration section to see if there was anything new.

On a bottom shelf in that area, tucked into a corner, she spied a huge, thick tome titled _The Trickiest Transfiguration: A Guide To Becoming An Animagus_ and stopped for a minute. Professor Dumbledore – Albus – had devoted several lectures to Animagi back in her third year, or maybe her fourth. It had sounded interesting, but with all the other work she had to do, she'd had no time to really investigate the subject beyond what she needed to know for exams. Now she had time. It wasn't as if she was spending many hours sleeping, after all.

Suddenly it hit her like a freight train: this could be the solution to her problem! If she could become an animal -- something small, something that would go unnoticed among all the other animals at Hogwarts -- she could sneak around wherever and whenever she wanted. She could spy on Tom like nobody's business. And if he, or anyone else, tried to molest her while she was in human form, well, turning into an animal would put a stop to that even more effectively than a blast from her wand, wouldn't it? 

Minerva pulled the book off the shelf and added it to her pile. Panting slightly (the dratted thing was as heavy as four normal books), she carried it up to the front of the shop and paid.


	5. The Agreement

**Author's Note**: Just a little more progression of the tale. Regarding the title: I agree, it seems strange to have a story called "June Week" that now contains events taking place in December. I think it might confuse people if I changed the title at this point, though. I may eventually break the later chapters out into a separate story, the way I spun "June Week" off from "Ties That Bind," but _I'm _evenstarting to get confused with all the sequels of sequels I've got going on. =) 

Thanks to everyone who's reviewed. Your feedback keeps me going!

**Spoilers**: Through first two books.

**Rating**: PG

**Disclaimer**: Everything associated with the Harry Potter universe belongs to J.K. Rowling and her publishers. Not me. 

**Chapter 5**: The Agreement

By the time Dumbledore returned, nearly an hour late because of all the mess on the streets, an early winter twilight was already beginning to fall over the crammed-together buildings of Diagon Alley. 

Minerva, waiting impatiently near the brick archway, spotted him and hurried over, holding her skirt up out of the slush with one hand and lugging a large Flourish and Blotts bag with the other.

"How was your meeting?" she asked breathlessly, setting her bag down on the pavement and rummaging around in it.

"Fine, thank you," said Dumbledore, amused at the sight of her trying to politely inquire about his day when she was about to explode with news of her own. She had red, frost-nipped cheeks and snow in her hair, and looked happier and more animated than he'd seen her in months.

"Oh, good ..." Her mind clearly wasn't on his answer, but on something in the bag. In a moment she pulled out a colossal book and pressed it into his hands. "Can you teach me this?"

"Slow down, slow down," Dumbledore said with a chuckle. "Let's get in out of the cold before we start planning your graduate studies, shall we?" He dropped the book back into the bag, picked it up, grabbed her by the elbow and steered her into the firelit warmth of the Leaky Cauldron. 

Once inside, he made her sit down and order food before he'd consent to look at what she'd given him. Then he went through an elaborate production of cleaning and adjusting his glasses and finding the right distance to hold the book at, all the while enjoying her frustration. 

"The Animagus transformation," he said finally. "It's very difficult, you know. And not entirely risk-free."

"Yes, I remember that from your lectures." Minerva was leaning toward him in eager anticipation. "I want to learn it. Will you help me?"

"Certainly I will," he said, and she breathed out a sigh of relief.

"How long will it take?"

He shrugged. "A few months, maybe a year, maybe more. It depends on whether you have the talent for it - which I think you will - and how hard you work."

"I'll work hard," Minerva said fervently.

"I don't doubt that in the least," Dumbledore replied. "And before we even start, let me warn you: I'm not agreeing to help you so you can become obsessed and work yourself into the infirmary. You're to keep your main focus on your day job, eat and sleep properly, and leave at least a little time for recreation. Don't argue," he added, as she drew breath to do just that. "I know how you get about these things. You spend far too much time shut up in your room already as it is."

Deflated a bit by this, Minerva scowled down at her plate and jabbed at her untouched food with her fork.

"But," he went on, "I must say I'm very proud of you for wanting to try. Do you realize how few people have accomplished the transformation in the last fifty years? You'll definitely earn a moment in the sun if you succeed." 

"_When_ I succeed," she corrected him.

"Quite," said Dumbledore, amused all over again.

They sat and ate in companionable silence for a while, watching the mostly strange patrons that frequented the Leaky Cauldron. At one point, a nice-looking young wizard in a grey cloak passed by and stared at Minerva appreciatively. She gave him an offended glare in return and scooted closer to Dumbledore on the wooden bench they shared. The wizard looked from one of them to the other, first puzzled, then a little disgusted, and left.

Dumbledore shook his head slightly. He knew all about Minerva's fledgling infatuation with him, of course. In the long span of his teaching career, he'd been the object of more teenage crushes, both male and female, than he could count.  The signs were unmistakable, though Minerva was less obvious and more dignified about it than most. (Here he spared a moment to squirm at the memory, still blush-provoking after forty years, of the sixth-year girl who had thrown off her cloak halfway through a conference with him to reveal not a stitch of clothing underneath.)

Minerva's feelings would fade as quickly as they had blossomed, he thought. In a few weeks or months, she would meet someone close to her own age and forget all about him, except as a friend and mentor. He would walk her down the aisle at her wedding, spoil her children with toys and sweets on their birthdays. There was no reason she shouldn't have a brilliant career and a family too. Many Hogwarts professors did; the house-elves looked after the children when they were small, and some of the more junior staff saw to their lessons until they were ready to enroll as regular students. That was how Minerva herself would have grown up, had her father not elected to quit Hogwarts - and civilization - altogether.

He gazed over at her sharp profile, made all the more striking by the severe new hairstyle she was affecting these days. He never would have wished for anything to happen to Minerva's father, but he would forever be grateful that he'd had the chance to play surrogate parent to her. Really, he couldn't have loved the girl any more if she'd been his very own. It was such a relief to see her excited about this Animagus project. She'd been so preoccupied and jittery since this term had started.

_This will be just what she needs_, he thought. He only hoped that spending the extra time with him wouldn't prolong the natural course of her crush, or prompt her to do anything reckless. "Reckless" and "Minerva" were not two words that normally went together, so it probably wouldn't.

He'd been lost in these thoughts for a while when someone near the bar said "Sssshhh – listen!" and the entire room fell silent. Off in the distance, a faint drone, as of engines, could be heard.

Dumbledore looked at the nearest window, which was completely dark now. It was night - but the Muggle air raids didn't come till much later in the night, did they? 

Or did they?

_To be continued ..._


	6. Explosions

Chapter 6: Explosions 

Throughout Muggle London, all hell was breaking loose as defense sirens wailed and people ran for cover. It had been some time since the last air raid, and a false sense of safety had crept over the city. Now that feeling was shattering like so much blown-out window glass.

The mood inside the Leaky Cauldron was more subdued, but no less tense. After a few minutes of quiet, the patrons had begun to talk and move around again - they knew about the protective spells over Diagon Alley and all its businesses - but there were more than a few nervous faces, and a trickle of people was quietly departing through the rear doors.

Far away at first, the booms and shudders of bomb explosions and gunfire soon drew closer. When the plates on the table started to rattle with each one, Dumbledore decided it was time to take Minerva and go. She was already sitting rigidly at the edge of the bench, looking pale and worried, and jumped up without hesitation at his suggestion that they head back to Hogwarts. They left a few coins to pay for dinner and moved toward the exit. 

But going was easier said than done. The numbers who were leaving had increased sharply as the action heated up, forcing them to push and struggle to get out to the designated Apparition point. Just as they reached the open air, a loud, angry buzz was heard overhead, and the entire crowd looked up in time to see a formation of low-flying planes zipping past. An instant later, the fiercest explosion yet rocked the street. A tower of thick, whitish smoke immediately climbed into the sky, and a violent red glow filled the horizon between the buildings.

Minerva grabbed for Dumbledore's hand. "That was too close," she said urgently. "Let's go _now_."

"We're almost there," he said. They were getting shoved from behind by the growing mob, and he decided that if they weren't able to move any farther in a hurry, he was going to Apparate right from where he stood, and rules be damned.

No sooner had he thought this than the buzz of planes returned, louder than ever, and an unbelievable wave of force threw him off his feet.

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When the second explosion came, Minerva lost her grip on Dumbledore and was flung facedown into a pile of snow with a crushing weight on top of her. She lay stunned for a minute, fighting for air - all her wind had been knocked out by the blow. Then she crawled out from under the heavyset wizard who had landed on her and knelt beside him to see if he was all right. He seemed to be in one piece, just dazed, so she left him where he was and looked about for Dumbledore. 

_He was here a second ago. What happened?_ She automatically put her hand into her pocket and curled her fingers around her wand. It wasn't likely to be much help in this situation, but she felt better with its familiar smoothness against her palm. 

The blast had tossed her next to a wall, which was fortunate, as the street was now full of agitated witches and wizards who looked ready to start trampling each other any second. Plastering herself against the bricks, Minerva stretched up to her full height and craned her neck, searching for any glimpse of Dumbledore's familiar silver-flecked auburn hair and beard. She still couldn't see him, but she _could_ see something terrible: another group of planes streaking in her direction. A series of fresh explosions erupted as they passed. The final one struck the invisible barrier over Diagon Alley, and Minerva gasped at the image of bright orange flame spreading across it, turning the sky into a dome of fire.

"Can it stand up to direct hits like that?" It was the wizard who had knocked her down, now getting shakily to his feet.

"I don't know," Minerva said, unable to take her eyes off the horror above her. She prayed to all the powers there were that it could. Another explosion came, and still another. Each lit up the street with a brilliant flash, not unlike that of fireworks.

"You'd best get out of here, girl," said the wizard. "Don't bother going to the Apparition point." With that, he took his own advice and vanished.

_Get out of here, I wish I could,_ Minerva thought in desperation. _Where the bloody hell is Dumbledore? I can't go without him. I won't._

Frantic screams erupted from the crowd, and she stopped hunting for Dumbledore long enough to cast a glance upward and see that a ragged hole had developed in the barrier. Smoke was pouring through it, collecting just underneath for now, but inching down toward the street as its volume increased. Soon she wouldn't be able to see Dumbledore even if he was a foot away.

"Minerva, there you are!" She knew it was him even before she looked around, and slumped against the wall in relief.

"Thank goodness. Where on earth have you been? I've been looking for you."

"I ended up by Ollivander's," he said, running his hands quickly over her to check that she wasn't hurt. Normally she would have been pleased to have him touch her in any way – he was the only person who could do that without making her flinch these days. Right now she was too scared and upset to enjoy it. That was just her sort of luck.

"Well, I'm glad to see you. Come on, let's go, please, before anything worse happens."

"You'll have to go back on your own," Dumbledore said. His eyes had none of the mischievous twinkle she was used to seeing in them. They were dead serious. "I'm needed here to help repair the spells. I'll join you as soon as I can."

"And leave you here? No! Let me stay. I'll help too. I want to help."

"Absolutely not. You'll go straight to Hogsmeade and use the fireplace at the Three Broomsticks to get back to the castle. I mean it, Minerva. I've already made a mistake in bringing you here to begin with. I've no intention of leaving you in harm's way a minute longer."

"But you _can't _stay – if it's dangerous for me, it's dangerous for you too -" The first wafts of smoke were beginning to work their way down to street level, and she broke off, coughing.

"I don't want to hear another word about it," Dumbledore said, in a tone that clearly meant business. She found she couldn't keep arguing her point in spite of her longing to do so -- he'd been her teacher and House head for years, she was accustomed to obeying him. 

"All right," she said, defeated. "Just please, please be careful." 

With one last look at him, she Apparated away.

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Getting back to Hogwarts took a matter of minutes. The hours that followed seemed to last forever. 

Minerva wrapped a blanket around herself and sat in front of the empty fireplace in her room – frosty as the night was, she couldn't face the task of lighting a fire after all the flames she'd seen earlier in the evening – smelling smoke in her hair and on her clothes, and pondering everything that had happened. She was furious at Professor Dumbledore (_Albus, damn it, call him Albus_) for forcing her to leave the scene. Did he think her completely incompetent? She was a witch, just as he was a wizard. If he believed she'd be terrified into helplessness, it was only because he'd no idea of what she'd been dealing with on her own, these last six months. 

_I could have helped_, she thought angrily. _Why wouldn't he let me? Why can I ask him for help, but he can't ask me?_

Mixed in with her anger was agonizing worry for his safety. Whether he ever returned her new feelings or no, he was the best friend and only real family she had. No one else cared for her the way he did. She couldn't bear to lose him. 

Finally, around midnight, Dumbledore returned and stopped in to see her. He reeked of smoke even more powerfully than she did, and he was covered with ash and black soot, but he was uninjured. It was all she could do not to weep with relief. 

Once he'd told her the story of what happened after she left (there'd been no casualties, and they'd managed to patch together and reinforce the protective spells), he instructed her to go to bed, and before she knew what she was doing, she found herself obeying again. Her last thought before falling asleep – easily, for a change – was that if she'd learned one thing that night, it was that she'd never escape troubles by leaving Hogwarts. There were troubles everywhere. It was cold comfort, yes, but better some comfort than none.

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Early the following Monday morning, Minerva arrived at the Transfiguration room to teach and was immediately swamped by a wave of students.

"Miss McGonagall, we heard you were in a bombing!"

"Was it awful?"

"Were you frightened?"

"Did you see anyone killed?"

"Tell us!"

"Yes, do tell us, Miss McGonagall," came a deeper voice from behind her, and Minerva whipped around to see none other than the dreaded Tom Riddle standing there with his blessedly ribbon-free book satchel slung over one shoulder, watching the proceedings. It was the first time he'd spoken to her directly since the previous spring, and her heart lurched with such alarm at the sound that she thought it had actually stopped for a moment. 

Tom gazed back at her, all innocence and raised eyebrows, as if waiting as eagerly for her story as the children surrounding her. He had grown of late – instead of matching her height as he had done, he now surpassed it by at least three inches. She had to tilt her head up to look him in the face. From there, her eyes traveled down to the pale hand wrapped around the strap of his satchel, and she swallowed hard, trying not to think of how that hand must have touched her defenseless body, must have clamped over her mouth to silence her … 

_Just ignore him_, she thought. She shooed her charges inside the classroom and shut the door, resisting the urge to lock it for good measure.

The students didn't seem to notice their teacher's distress. They immediately carried on in the single-minded vein they'd been pursuing a moment before.

"Come on, Miss McGonagall, tell us what happened!" pleaded one of the smallest boys, crowding up close to her. "My cousin's street was bombed during the Blitz last year, and he said there were bricks and boards and bodies everywhere. Was it like that?"

Still floundering around in the wreck of her composure, Minerva tried to think of a response that would both satisfy them and shut them up. She'd been having some discipline problems – her three years of experience as a prefect helped surprisingly little when it came to keeping a class in order -- and could just imagine the entire lesson being wasted on a discussion of everyone's bombing experiences.

"That's nothing, Alexander," scoffed a girl at the edge of the group. "I saw _pieces_ of bodies when I was in the city after an attack last summer." She turned to Minerva for confirmation of this grisly fact of war. "There were pieces, weren't there? Like arms and legs and -"

Minerva suddenly found her voice. "No, there weren't any pieces, Miss Llewellyn, or any bodies either. What a horrid question! I'm disgusted that you asked it. Yes, the experience was frightening, but no one was seriously hurt - a fact for which you should all be very grateful. Now, we have a lot to cover before the holidays start, so I suggest you all take your seats and get in a Transfiguration frame of mind. Unless you'd like me to start deducting points, that is."

She hadn't meant to sound quite so snappish, but her ill temper did the trick where patience never seemed to. The class sat down, looking disappointed that they weren't going to hear a blood-curdling tale of death and danger, and she started passing out pencils for them to turn into peppermint sticks. As she did, she noticed that her hands were shaking.

_Pull yourself together, for heaven's sake_, she scolded herself. _You've survived having bombs go off over your head; there's no need to get the vapors just because he said a few words to you. You'll never be able to catch him if you can't stand to be near him. And it would be a shame to do all the work of becoming an Animagus and let him escape you after all._

"Miss McGonagall?" Alexander was calling to her from his desk.

"Yes, Mr. Barnett?"

"We're very glad you're all right," he said, and the lingering chill inside her vanished in a great rush of warmth and pleasure. This teaching business definitely had its rewards -- but it wouldn't do to lose the momentary control she'd gained to foolish sentimentality.

"Thank you," she said crisply. "Now, please open up to Page 78 …"


	7. Year Of The Cat

**Chapter 7: Year Of The Cat**

Once back within the castle's timeless walls and far away from airplanes and explosions, Minerva was able to put her experience in Diagon Alley more or less out of her mind, though it was a long time before she stopped flinching at sudden noises. Luckily, she had the distractions of Christmas to help.

Her present from Dumbledore was a heap of additional books on Animagi, which he gave her with orders to put them away until after the holidays. ("You'll be spending enough time on this for the next few months. Go and enjoy yourself now while you can.") She tried to follow his instructions, but couldn't resist flipping through some of the books in idle moments. No doubt he expected it of her anyway.

He had outlined an exhausting course of study stretching all the way to the end of the school year (she refrained from mentioning that she planned to cut that in half so she could get on with the business of spying) and they were scheduled to begin on New Year's Day. Before that could happen, however, she had to think about which animal she might become. And being the methodical person she was, she went about it in a methodical manner.

**Cat**

_Advantages: Quick, strong, can see in dark, has natural weapons (claws and teeth)_

Disadvantages: Sheds

**Owl**

Advantages: Can fly, has natural weapons (talons and beak), lightweight

Disadvantages: Can't travel on the ground

**Toad**

Advantages:

Minerva paused for a minute and looked up from the neat list she was making. _Were_ there any advantages to being a toad? She couldn't think of one, except perhaps being so grotty that few people would want to touch her.

"It's owl or cat, then. Which do you think I should choose?" she asked Sugar, who was perched on her shoulder, looking over at her list as if he could read it.

_Owl! Be an owl, Minerva! We can fly together. I'll teach you to hunt for rodents. It'll be lovely_. He nearly pecked her in excitement, but recovered himself just in time. Like Dumbledore, he was pleased to see Minerva happy for a change. He didn't really understand what had made her withdrawn and nervous all the summer and fall, but he knew that she'd been hurt, and that she meant to catch the perpetrator. Privately, he thought she should have told the old man what had happened straight away. Annoying as he could be, Dumbledore always seemed to know what to do about things. But Minerva was Sugar's person, the only person he had ever cared for at all, and he supported her in whatever she did, whether he approved of it or not.

That loyalty was seriously tried when Minerva said musingly "I think I should be a cat. No offense meant to you, Sugar -- you are an amazing creature -- but you're so conspicuous. I need to be stealthy."

_Hmmph. Well, you've got the "amazing creature" part right, Sugar grumped to himself, but a CAT - ugh!_ He spread his snowy wings and flew up to his perch, where he promptly went to sleep in a snit. Rolling her eyes, Minerva went off to announce her decision to her teacher.

Dumbledore approved of her choice of animal, but warned her that it wasn't always possible to become precisely what one wanted to. Some Animagi had started out with lofty dreams of being phoenixes and centaurs, only to discover that they were turtles and flobberworms on the inside.

"I think you'll do well enough, though," he said. "If you feel as if you might be a cat, then you may very well be one. And there is something rather catlike about you."

Not sure whether to take that as a compliment or an insult, she ignored it and set about her work. She read far into the night, every night, for weeks, drinking countless cups of tea and hot chocolate and filling rolls and rolls of parchment with notes. At the same time, thinking that having an actual cat around might be just the inspiration she needed, she asked Headmaster Dippet if she could borrow Isolde, his beloved Siamese. Isolde was extremely lazy and spoiled, but friendly enough as cats went, and Minerva spent what seemed like hours watching her eat, sleep, wash herself and chase things. 

Unfortunately, she also discovered that for all Isolde's finickiness about personal hygiene, the cat had some disgusting habits. The first of these manifested less than a week after Minerva had taken custody of her. She'd been down to Hogsmeade to do some errands she'd been putting off for ages, and was returning to her room with an armful of packages and a pleasant sense of accomplishment.

"Sugar, I'm back, and I brought you the Owl Tr - bloody _hell_, what is that?" she finished, staring in horror at what appeared to be the severed head of a robin on her pillow.

Sugar screeched from his perch high on the wall. _Don't look at ME! I leave all MY remains outside where they belong. Ask the fur rug under the bed. _As if on cue, Isolde poked her head out beneath the edge of the crimson bed curtains, licking her lips with immense relish and not a shred of guilt. 

Minerva sighed, set her parcels aside, gingerly removed the head and threw it out the window. "I'm beginning to think you're more trouble than you're worth, Isolde," she said to the cat, which responded by leaping onto the bed and curling up on the now-empty pillow.

_I'll second that!_ Sugar put in snippily. He was still offended that Minerva hadn't wanted to become an owl, but thought he could put up with feline company as long as she was the feline. Isolde was another story. Not only was she taking Minerva's attention away from him, but she _would_ keep stalking him when he wasn't looking. He would have moved completely to the Owlery if he hadn't thought his girl needed him there for protection. Anyone who tried to harm her would have an angry owl to deal with, and that was no small obstacle. He was quite sure that Isolde, faced with danger, would do nothing but lie about purring and licking her paws. That, or hide in the closet.

Despite such inconveniences, Minerva's groundwork progressed smoothly enough, taking up the entire months of January and February and spilling over into early March. She was forced to give up her watch on Tom during this time -- she was just too busy with her teaching job and her extra studies to handle any other activities. Although her spying efforts had been cursory and ineffectual thus far, it galled her to abandon them, even in the cause of learning to do better. She'd heard the House heads discussing whom next year's Head Boy and Girl should be, and Tom was almost a shoo-in for the position. Just what she needed -- another honor to make his star brighter and her mission more difficult.

She longed desperately for the moment when Dumbledore would announce that she was ready to begin work on the actual Animagus transformation. But no matter how she pestered him, his only response was to tell her to keep at her books.

Late in the second week of March, they got an abnormally fine day for the time of year, and she decided a change of scenery might help her concentrate better on her research. She didn't have any classes of her own to teach that day, and none of the professors needed help, so she packed up all her notes and carted them out to a private place on the grounds, near the edge of the forest. It was a little copse of trees, just a few of them, standing all on its own like a sentry the forest had sent out to scout for it. She'd gone there for many reasons during her tenure as a student: to cry over disappointments, to ponder her future, and, of course, to study.

The spot was as pleasant as ever, even if the ground was still rather damp and chilly. She conjured a blanket from her room and spread it on the grass to save her robes getting dirty, then carefully laid out her supplies and set to work. Perhaps an hour had gone by when a large shadow -- a very large shadow -- fell across her, and she glanced up in alarm.

Hagrid, the huge gamekeeper's assistant, was standing in front of her, looking as if he wanted to say something, but didn't want to interrupt her. She'd seen him around the school several times this year, burning leaves and carting things about, but hadn't been this close to him since he'd been expelled. He'd been a big boy then. Now his size bordered on shocking. He had to be close to seven feet tall, Minerva thought, and wondered briefly if that was normal for a fourteen-year-old. 

Well, overgrown or not, she knew him too well to be frightened of him. Even when he'd brought his wild beasts into the castle, he'd never meant any harm by it - and Albus trusted him, didn't he? Surely she could too. 

"Hello, Hagrid," she said.

"I've been wantin' to talk to yeh," Hagrid said. Then he stopped as if he'd run out of words. Minerva waited a minute.

"Here I am," she said at last, when he didn't seem to be planning any more conversational gambits. "Can I help you with something?"

"It's Professor Dumbledore's birthday tomorrow," he said. "Yeh knew that, o' course. An' I was wonderin' -- I was wonderin' if yeh'd like ter help me plan a little celebration for him."

Minerva was touched by this idea. She'd bought Albus a gift weeks ago -- it was wrapped and tucked away on a high shelf, safely out of range of Isolde's slashing claws -- but she hadn't thought of having a party for him, other than the one that all the staff was attending that night.

"That sounds nice," she said. "What sort of celebration did you have in mind?"

"I thought we could fix dinner for him," Hagrid said, "I know yeh're very close with him, like I am, so the two of us together -"

"I don't know -- I can't really cook," Minerva said dubiously. She had many skills, but cooking wasn't one of them. When she'd lived on her own in the months after her father had died, she'd done what any eleven-year-old in that situation would have done: eaten things she liked and didn't have to fuss over, which in her case had meant a steady diet of bread, butter, jam, tinned meat and Walker's shortbread biscuits. Then she'd come to Hogwarts, where she'd never had to think about food because it simply appeared on her plate at mealtimes. As a result, she didn't have a clue where to begin making a boiled egg, much less an entire meal.

"I can!" said Hagrid, suddenly eager and animated rather than shy. "Dad taught me, 'fore he passed on. I'll tell yeh what ter do -- I just can't work the magic. They broke my wand, yeh know." He looked sad for a minute, then brightened. "So, what d'yeh say? I think Dumbledore'll like it. An' we both of us owe him a lot. We're like his kids, yeh know, since he's got none of his own."

Minerva choked with laughter, though the thought of being lumped in as one of the "kids" hurt - that certainly wasn't how she wanted Albus to think of her. "A fine brother and sister we'd make! Oh, don't look so wounded, Hagrid. You have to admit we don't have much of a family resemblance, to each other or Professor Dumbledore."

"Yer right abou' that," Hagrid admitted with a faint smile. "Will yeh help me, then?"

"Why not?" she said, giving in to impulse for once. "Do you want to do it in your house?" She saw Hagrid blush, realized that hadn't come out quite right, and added "Have the meal there, I mean?"

"Sure," he said, scuffling the ground with a large boot. "Come down tomorrow afternoon and we'll get started. Oh, an' tell Dumbledore when to stop by, but don' tell him why."

"All right," she said, and suddenly found herself smiling up at him. "This really is thoughtful of you, Hagrid. Thank you for including me."

Hagrid blushed harder. "It's nothin'," he said.


	8. Hagrid's Philosophy

At four p.m. sharp the next day, Minerva was outside Hagrid's hutlike residence, knocking on the painted wooden door. He answered looking excited and nervous, and quite forgot to invite her in. Eventually, she just edged past his bulky form and into the interior of the house.

He'd obviously made an effort to tidy up -- the floor was freshly swept and the table already laid -- but the detritus of a teenage boy living on his own was in evidence all over the single room. There were posters of various Quidditch teams stuck up on the walls and several articles of grungy-looking laundry peeking out of a basket in the corner. Heaps of cheap magazines, some with Muggle film stars on their covers, some with wizard musicians and athletes, and at least one with a half-clothed girl, lay on the floor beside the bed. Hagrid followed her gaze to this last item, swooped down, removed it from the top of its pile and swiftly hid it under his mattress, blushing all over again.

Minerva decided to ignore that. If Hagrid wanted to read dirty magazines when he was here alone, it was his business. At least he'd had the decency to look embarrassed.

"So, what are we making for dinner?" she asked, walking over to the small kitchen area and surveying the ingredients he had set out.

"Rabbit stew an' dumplings," he said. "I caught rabbits in the forest a few days ago. They're hangin' up outside, should be ready by now. We'll make a cake too."

"Very well, let's get started," she said.

An hour later, she was beginning to think that if cooking was always this difficult, she'd never eat anyplace but the Great Hall for the rest of her life. Between the two of them, they'd managed to spill flour all over the floor (her), sustain a nasty cut to the thumb (Hagrid) and burn some chopped onions into a caramelized black mess in the bottom of Hagrid's best frying pan (both of them). They didn't know each other well enough to feel comfortable working together, and by the time they'd got the spells right and set the stew pot simmering and the cake baking, they were both overheated and irritated.

"Let's sit outside while it cooks," Hagrid suggested, and she agreed gratefully. They went and settled themselves on the front step. Across the lawn, they could see students moving back and forth, heading to classes in the greenhouses and animal paddocks, stopping in pairs and groups to talk.

"Still seems funny, not bein' with the rest of 'em," Hagrid said, his gaze fixed pensively on his former classmates.

_What am I supposed to say to that_? Minerva wondered. She felt whatever she said would be wrong, so instead she asked "Are you enjoying your new job?"

He shrugged, and the fabric of his jacket stretched perilously over his massive shoulders. "It's all right. I get to work outside, and Ogg's nice enough for a boss. He's taught me a lot. Anyway, yeh got to do somethin' to make a livin'."

"I feel the same way about my job sometimes," Minerva said, and he gaped at her in amazement.

"You? Hard to believe. Look at yeh, not even a year out of school and almost a professor already. 'Course it's no surprise, yeh were always so smart, near first in most things and a prefect too. A real asset ter Hogwarts."

"You make me sound like a complete prig," she said.

"Well, yeh weren't a pain about it all, not like that fuckin' Tom Riddle -- oh, sorry! That's not a nice thing to say in front of a girl." He clapped a hand over his mouth as if he could push the offending word back in.

"I'm sure I'll survive the trauma," said Minerva wryly. 

"I still shouldn' have said it," Hagrid insisted, getting up and rearranging some tools hanging on the wall of his hut to avoid looking at her. She watched him, thinking now about his mention of Tom. She wasn't the only person who'd had a run-in with the notorious Master Riddle -- Hagrid had, too. She'd automatically assumed that he and his giant spider had been guilty, but was it true? Might Hagrid know something about Tom that could help her trap him?

"You mentioned Tom Riddle -- she began, but Hagrid cut her off.

"I don't want ter talk abou' him," he said. "What happened with him and me is in the past, and that's where it should stay. Dad taught me that yeh should let the past go. He said he never would have made it after Mum -- after she was gone, if he hadn' been able ter to do that."

Minerva frowned disapprovingly at this.

"That's not right," she said. "What about justice? Suppose someone had done something wrong, and you could see them punished for it?"

"There's no such thing as justice," said Hagrid in bleak tones. "When somethin' bad's happened, yeh jus' have ter pick up an' go on from where yeh are."

"But -"

"I said I didn' want ter talk about it."

She noted the fierce, beetle-browed grimace on his face and gave in. The last thing she wanted was to get him upset and ruin the evening they'd planned for Albus. She'd just have to stick to her original plan of collecting information on her own.

Dumbledore turned up right on time and acted duly surprised, though Minerva privately suspected him of having caught on to their scheme in advance. They all went inside, and Hagrid, much happier now that his hero was here and Minerva had stopped trying to talk about his nemesis, ladled out three huge bowls of the rabbit stew.

Minerva peered into hers and shuddered. She wasn't a huge fan of game to begin with, and somehow their concoction looked and smelled odder than such things usually did. It didn't make sense. All the ingredients had been fine when they'd put them in the pot. She took an exploratory bite and nearly spat it out again, but forced herself to chew.

_This is the worst stuff I've ever eaten_, she thought. Across the table, Dumbledore seemed to be having the same idea, and even Hagrid looked less than delighted.

"That's funny," he said ruminatively. "It always came out better than this when Dad made it."

They all finished their first bites and sat there, spoons in hand, each waiting for someone else to continue. At last, Minerva said "Suppose we just have the cake, then?" and Hagrid, obviously relieved, jumped up to fetch it.

She lit the candles with a flick of her wand, and they sang a relatively tuneful version of "Happy Birthday" to a pleased-looking Dumbledore. Then Hagrid plunged a large knife into the cake to cut slices -- and exclaimed in unhappy surprise when a gooey mess of semi-baked batter oozed out of the center. It seemed the cake hadn't baked all the way through, which was odd, as some burnt bits were showing around the edges where the icing didn't cover.

Everyone stared at everyone else for a long minute. Then Hagrid gave a huge guffaw of laughter. Dumbledore followed suit. And Minerva found herself laughing too, harder than she'd laughed in ages and ages, until her sides hurt and tears ran down her face. She forgot about fear and pain and secrets and fatigue and just sat there, looking at their foul stew and half- raw, half-scorched cake, and nearly shrieking with laughter. It was a wonderful feeling.


	9. Ups And Downs

**Chapter 9: Ups And Downs**

Dumbledore thanked his protégés profusely for their efforts, and then, to their intense relief, conjured up some edible food from the castle kitchens. By the time they finished their meal and conversation, night had long since arrived, and he insisted on walking Minerva back to the castle proper. The two of them said good night to Hagrid and left him standing in the doorway of his hut, backlit by the yellow glow of the fire, waving a little forlornly. 

A heavy dew had fallen along with the darkness, and the early spring grass was wet under their shoes and around their ankles. Minerva attempted to keep the hem of her dress dry for a few steps, but quickly gave it up as hopeless. Sometimes she missed her school uniform - it had been much more comfortable, and practical for getting around, than the clothes she wore now.

Once they were out of Hagrid's earshot, Dumbledore stopped her.

"I've been waiting to tell you all day," he said. "I brought Headmaster Dippet up to speed on your progress this morning, and he agrees with me that you are ready to attempt the Animagus transformation proper now. We can begin working on it tomorrow after classes, if you would like to."

"Like to! I'd start this instant if I thought you'd let me!" 

Dumbledore laughed at her eagerness. "Tomorrow will be soon enough. Remember, it will take a while. You won't get it right on the first try. No one does."

"I know, I know." No number of warnings could ruin this moment, she thought. She'd embarked on the project with only the idea of obtaining justice in mind, but along the way, she'd succumbed to the pure academic challenge of it as well. Now she was going to take a massive step toward realizing both goals. And Dumbledore was the one who was helping her make it possible. She felt giddy with excitement.

Much later that night, she would sit looking out her window at this exact spot, wondering what mad impulse had made her do what she did next. It might have been the joy of hearing the news she'd been waiting so long for, or the warm afterglow of all their laughter, or even the way the moonlight glittered on the grass. But none of these things were clear in her mind when she twined her arms around her mentor's neck and planted a kiss - a little awkward, but with all the weight of her love for him behind it - square on his mouth.

As soon as their lips touched, she knew it wasn't going to work. She'd never kissed anyone before, but she could tell that he wasn't responding the way he was supposed to. Still, she hung on doggedly, with the thought that somehow if she tried hard enough her feelings might suffice for both of them, until he untangled himself from her embrace.

"Oh, Minerva," he said, almost sadly. 

She stared down at her feet, longing for a Time-Turner so she could do the last sixty seconds over again and take everything back. With one stupid act, she'd utterly destroyed the happy mood of the evening. Now he would either hate her or pity her. She wasn't sure which would be worse. 

"I'm sorry," she muttered. "I didn't mean it. Forget it."

"You did mean it," he said. He reached out, put his hand under her chin and turned her face up so she had to meet his eyes. The look in them was gentle and affectionate, and only served to intensify her misery. "Listen - no, don't look away. I hadn't meant to say anything about this, but now I think I should. I know how you've been feeling about me lately, Minerva, and I am so very flattered by it. But I do not feel that way about you. I cannot. You are a lovely, intelligent girl, but you are a very young girl, far too young to be romantically involved with me. It is simply impossible."

This statement seemed to leave no room for argument, but she tried anyway, as she had nothing left to lose.

"My mother was younger than I am when she met my father," she said, "and he was older than you are. It didn't matter to them."

"But it matters to me," said Dumbledore. 

"I understand." She aimed for a calm, firm tone, and with a massive effort, achieved it. The effect was spoiled, though, when tears spilled over her lower lashes and down her cheeks. Dumbledore fished a large handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped them away, only to see them immediately replaced by others. 

"Ssshhh, ssshhh," he soothed. "Everything will be all right, Minerva, you'll see. I do love you. It's a different sort of love, that's all. You and I will always be friends, won't we?"

"Yes ..."

"Of course we will. Now here, blow -" here he held the handkerchief up to her face again, "and we'll say no more about it. Come, we should be getting back now -"

"No, wait here. I want to go by myself," she interrupted. Walking along with him as if nothing had happened - that would be impossible.

"It isn't safe, Minerva. The animals in the forest come out at night, and ..."

"I know that! Really, I'm not an infant, whatever you may think. I assure you I can walk up the hill without being eaten by a werewolf. You can stand here and watch me if you have to. I just want to be alone." The harsh sound of her own voice appalled her. What was wrong with her, that all her negative feelings ended up turning into anger?

Dumbledore saw her spiraling out of control and yielded. "All right, but go quickly."

"Good night," she said, and started walking, holding herself stiff as a tin soldier to show him that she wasn't running away or falling apart. Her skirts were thoroughly soaked for the last several inches now, so dark with moisture that they looked black instead of the dark blue they were. They clung to her legs and made walking difficult, but she didn't stop.

_How ever am I to work with him now_? she wondered.

~~~

Working together turned out to be much easier than she had feared. She came to their first real practice session with a knot in her stomach, prepared to feel uncomfortable and embarrassed, but Dumbledore was true to his word and never mentioned their awkward moment on the lawn. He acted so normal and matter-of-fact that she was able to relax and get to work almost immediately. 

If only the work itself had been so simple. The Animagus transformation was a different type of spell than she had ever attempted before. And Dumbledore had been right - she wasn't able to do it on the first try, or any try after that. She was used to being the star student, the one who caught on to everything right away, and as weeks and then months passed, she became terribly frustrated with herself, with Dumbledore, and with the situation.

There were a few glimmers of progress. Sometimes she succeeded in giving herself a set of whiskers, sometimes one paw or a tail or patches of fur on various parts of her body. Sometimes she shrank halfway to the size of a cat, but kept her human form. But at no time did she succeed in achieving her desired shape completely.

After one particularly hard session in early September, when in three hours of struggling she'd managed to twist herself into every frightful pseudo-feline shape possible, she reached the breaking point. She'd been trying the transformation over and over, without stopping a moment to rest in between, and was trembling and drenched with sweat, no longer able to put any real energy into her attempts, but helpless to leave off. Finally, Dumbledore shook her sharply by the shoulder and said "Minerva, stop it!"

She stopped, feeling sore and tired and a little sick, and looked up at him. His face was both worried and irritated.

"I've been telling you to stop for five minutes," he said. He still had hold of her shoulder, gripping it hard, though not enough to really hurt. "Did you not hear? What's got into you today?"

"Nothing's got into me!" she snapped back, annoyed that he didn't understand how important it was for her to master this.

_He can't understand,_ whispered her inner voice, _because he doesn't know why you want to do it. He thinks it's just you getting obsessed the way you always do_. Suddenly she felt the disconnection between them very keenly. It was as if she was on one cliff and he was on another, and in the middle was a vast chasm that held all their assumptions and unspoken secrets. The thought came near to undoing her.

"I'm sorry," she said softly. "I can't help it. This means a lot to me, and I hate that I can't do it properly yet. Please don't be angry."

Dumbledore turned her loose, and she rubbed at the spots where his fingers had dug into her flesh.

"I'm not angry. I'm concerned," he said. "Minerva, I think perhaps you should stop working on this for a while. I want you to be successful as much as you do, but not at the cost of your health. Remember what I said back when I agreed to help you? You weren't to let the training consume you. Well, you look half dead from it."

Considering that she _felt_ half dead, she couldn't contradict him, so she repeated "It means a lot to me."

"I know." He put his arm around her (a bit diffidently - one thing that had definitely changed since her lapse in March was the amount of physical affection he showed her), and she leaned against him, wishing, not for the first time, that she could just tell him everything and have done with it. "You needn't give up altogether. Just take a few days off, rest, and come back to it when you're fresh. Do it for me."

~~~

Sometime during that night, Minerva found herself having a very curious dream, so clear that it was more like a memory. In it, she was very young, sitting on her father's lap and listening to him read from one of the Muggle books he had owned so many of. ("Muggles may be damned fools sometimes," he'd explained to her once, "but they write corking good stories.") It seemed to be her bedtime, because she was terribly drowsy, and because she was cuddling the stuffed Puffskein she'd always slept with as a child. She was also sucking her thumb, as she had done incessantly from birth to age seven. Oh, the orthodontic spells she'd had to endure as a result of that habit!

Her father smelled of pipe smoke and the strange ingredients he put in his potions, and his voice rumbled and reverberated through her small body as he spoke.

"`As for you,' Alice repeated, catching hold of the little creature in the very act of jumping over a bottle which had just lighted upon the table, `I'll shake you into a kitten, that I will!'"

"Can you really shake someone into a kitten?" Minerva interrupted.

"You'd be surprised at what you can do, if you try," he said. "Do you want to hear the rest of this story or not?"

"Yes," she said, nestling deeper into the crook of his arm. He went back to reading.

"The Red Queen made no resistance whatever; only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter - and fatter - and softer - and rounder-and - 

-- and it really was a kitten, after all."

On the last word, she woke up all at once, heart racing, the almost-forgotten sound of her father's voice echoing in her ears. Her blankets were tangled around her. Their weight was almost intolerable, as if they were made of lead instead of cotton. They were making her feverishly hot. She squirmed fretfully until she got out from under them - and realized that there was more wrong here than just too many covers. Her bed seemed to have grown since she'd fallen asleep, grown into a vast plateau the size of three of the tables in the Great Hall pushed together. The ceiling looked miles away. So did the floor, and all the walls. Some things were blurrier than usual, some things were sharper, and the colors of her curtains and carpet were very muddled.

And her vision wasn't the only thing that had gone strange. Every inch of her felt hypersensitive, as if she'd been sunburned. Without the oppressive blankets on her, the very air itched and tingled on her skin. The room was full of powerful, conflicting odors, too: owl feathers, wool, ink, parchment, perfume, tea leaves, and others she couldn't pick out individually.

She bolted upright in a panic, trying to work out what had happened. The last time she'd woken up so disoriented had been that awful morning in June - but this wasn't the same. She didn't feel ill or in pain, just strange.

_I'm not myself_, she thought. _I'm not myself AT ALL_. It seemed a ridiculous understatement, but it summed up the situation better than anything else.

Slowly, fearfully, she looked down at her own body to see what sort of condition it was in, and nearly fainted. She had fur, soft grey fur with black stripes. Her hands and feet were soft, padded paws. And that long whippy thing behind her- she switched it experimentally - was a tail. For once, all the parts she'd been producing singly were there at the same time.

She was a cat. Somehow, in her sleep, she'd accomplished the task she hadn't been able to while awake. But she hadn't even tried to do it, and now she wasn't sure she'd be able to get back again - she'd been practicing under such close supervision from Dumbledore that she'd assumed he would be there to help her when this moment arrived. Someone was _meant _to be there, just in case something went wrong. 

Nothing terrible seemed to be happening, though. She felt confused and distressed, but she still had a fair grip on the situation. Perhaps she could change back on her own after all.

_Stay calm. It's only Transfiguration, really, and you know how to do that. Just try the reverse transformation, and if it doesn't work - well, then you can figure out what to do from there._

Closing her eyes and plucking up all her courage, she concentrated hard on the reversal spell. Nothing happened the first time, or the ten times after that, and she began to lose hope. Then on the twelfth attempt, with a slightly nauseating stretching-and-growing sensation, she turned back into herself.

No sooner had she finished changing than she was off the bed, wrenching open her door and pelting barefoot through the halls as if chased by trolls. She reached Dumbledore's private apartments, barked out the password (he'd given it to her some time ago in case of emergencies), slammed his door behind her and burst into the bedroom, where he lay asleep with his spectacles still perched on his nose and an open book facedown beside him. Without a thought to the propriety of her actions, she fell on her knees at his bedside and flung herself across his chest.

"Argh - what - Minerva? What are you doing in here? What's happened?" Pushing her off, he sat up and looked at her in surprise and suspicion. She realized that he probably thought she was making a clumsy attempt at seduction, but she was too excited to care.

"The transformation - I woke up and I was - but it happened by accident - Albus, it _worked_! I turned!"

"You did? Completely?" 

"Yes, completely. I don't know how I did it, though. I was asleep, and when I woke up, I was a cat. I had a little trouble with the counterspell, but I got it right eventually. Then I came here." She ran a hand through her loose, tangled hair and tried to smooth the creases out of her nightgown, thinking _I must look like a madwoman from a Gothic novel. No wonder he's staring at me like that._

"Fascinating," Dumbledore said. "Minerva, I promise you we will sort it all out, but for now, please excuse me so I can get dressed. And I really think you ought to get dressed too. Go put something on and come back in ten minutes."

"Oh ... oh, of course," she said, standing up and sidling toward the door. "I'm sorry I barged in on you. I was, ah, a little agitated."

"That is completely understandable," he said with a smile. "Oh, and Minerva?" 

"Yes?" She turned, almost at the door, and looked back at him.

"Congratulations," he said. "You're an Animagus."

~~~

**Author's Note**: The excerpt from _Through The Looking Glass_ in this chapter belongs to the estate of Lewis Carroll. 


	10. First Mission

**Chapter 10: First Mission**

_Congratulations. You're an Animagus._

So Dumbledore had said -- but of course, it wasn't as simple as all that. Minerva had done the transformation once, by accident, but there were still ages of endless, repetitive work ahead of her.

After she'd figured out how to transform at will, Dumbledore made her do it over and over, in different places and situations, until she thought she would lose her mind. The most outrageous moment came when they were standing on the dock one evening, watching the sun set in red-gold streaks over the forest, and without an instant's warning he pushed her off the edge and yelled "Change!"

She changed in midair, splashed in, sank, and came up in human form again, spluttering. It was late April, and the water was still very cold.

"What was that all about?" she shouted, paddling wildly in place.

"Suppose you were falling and had to transform on the instant?" he asked. "Now we know you'd be able to." He pointed his wand and a rope ladder attached itself to the edge of the dock. Muttering some of her father's choicest Gaelic curses under her breath, she climbed it (no mean feat in heavy, waterlogged robes) and sat down to dump dank lake water out of her shoes.

Dumbledore was laughing at her again, as he forever seemed to be doing.

"I'm glad you find this so amusing," she said severely. That made him laugh harder.

"They say there's nothing madder than a wet hen," he said, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, "but it ought to be 'wet cat' instead." With another wand-flick, she was dry again. "Change one more time, and then you're done for the day." She obliged, and he scooped her up and held her before she could turn back again.

"I must say, Minerva my dear, you make a very pretty tabby," he said. "I think I'll start calling you Tabby. It suits you."

Minerva let out a feline snort. Then she purred and rubbed her head against the front of his robes -- try as she might, she never could stay angry with him for long.

"Come along, then, Tabby," he said, setting her down carefully, so all her paws touched the ground at the same time. She changed back again with a popping sound. For once, she managed not to stumble, as she usually did when going from four feet to two, and allowed herself a small, private smile. The more mastery she gained over the transformation and her new shape, the more powerful and competent she felt. After a year spent slinking around the halls and jumping at shadows, getting a little of her old self-confidence back was sweet indeed.

That self-confidence had prompted her to plan her first real spying expedition for that very evening. Dumbledore had a dinner meeting with someone from the Ministry, so he wouldn't be expecting to see her in the dining hall. Plus, he and his guest would probably be occupied with drinks and conversation for hours afterward, which eliminated the possibility of him seeking her out to discuss anything work-related. Who knew when another opportunity like this would come along?

They walked back to the castle, where Dumbledore bid her farewell and went off to get ready for his appointment. Too nervous and keyed up to eat, she shuffled some paperwork around on her desk until the dinner hour ended. Then it was time to go.

The corridors were nearly empty, as most people went back to their common rooms to study after dinner. They were also very dark in the spaces between the wall-mounted torches. But nothing short of absolute blackness could blind Minerva's cat eyes, and she ran lightly along, as sure-footed as in broad daylight, toward the Slytherins' domain. She was filled with fierce joy and triumph at finally being on track toward her goal again, not to mention the sheer excitement of being on the hunt. From her sensitive ears to her quivering whiskers to her lean, lithe muscles, she was made to seek and find. And catch. And even kill, if it came to that, though the human part of her shied away from the idea.

_I'm on my way, Tom. I don't know what you're up to these days, but if it's anything I can catch you at, I will. Of that you may be sure. _

She scampered down a long flight of stairs, feeling the temperature plunge farther with each step, and entered the dungeons. There were the Potions classrooms on the left, the glass panels on their doors frosted over with cold. There was the supply closet where all the herbs and roots and other magical ingredients were kept. But where were the Slytherins? She cast about for a portrait like the one that guarded the Gryffindor common room and saw nothing.

_I know their dormitory is here somewhere. They always come and go in this direction_, she thought irritably as she sniffed around. Everything smelt of dirt and damp and people's shoes, but gave her no clue as to where the entrance might be. Not that she meant to actually go inside, at least not tonight. All she wanted was to watch. There was nothing to watch, though. It figured that after months of preparation, she'd chosen the dullest night of the year to make her first move.

Disheartened, she plopped down on the floor, avoiding the iron rings that were set into it to hold shackles (the Hogwarts dungeons had indeed been used for keeping prisoners at various times in their history), and swished her tail moodily from side to side. 

She sat there for a very long time, waiting and waiting for something to happen, getting more sleepy and cross by the moment. The blank stone wall across from her wavered in and out of focus as her eyes began to close. Then, suddenly, she realized that there were long cracks in it. Very faint ones, but cracks all the same -- four of them, in the shape of a door.

A door. _The_ door. Cats couldn't smile, despite what literature would have one believe, but Minerva felt she was grinning a huge Cheshire-cat grin on the inside. Really, it was perfectly, appropriately _Slytherin_ of them not to mark their door in any way. They were all about secrets and mysteries.

Padding across the cool stone floor, she investigated the horizontal line that was the bottom edge of the door, then reared up and stood on her hind legs, with her front paws on the wall for balance, so she could look at the other edges. Did it work with a password, like so many of the doors in the castle, she wondered, or was there a hidden button to open it?

Her answer arrived quickly in the persons of two Slytherins, seventh-years by the look of them, who came rushing up and snapped out "_Timere_!" With a rumble, the door slid aside, releasing a draft of warmer air and a faintly greenish light. Minerva had just enough time to see that the latter came from a row of ceiling-hung lamps inside before the pair passed through and the door shut behind them. Neither student had given her a second glance, which was exactly the way she wanted it. She took a moment to congratulate herself on becoming an animal that blended so well with the scores of others of its kind within Hogwarts, and then settled down again to watch the door.

Unfortunately, as she soon discovered, not everyone thought cats were beneath notice. Over the next hour, no less than ten Slytherins came by on their way to the common room, and of that group, more than half came over to pet her. This was very troublesome, both because it called attention to her presence and because it set an uneasy soup of feelings bubbling in her -- while her human mind resented the caresses and wanted to shy away from them, her cat body enjoyed them a bit too much for comfort. It was hard not to purr and let her back arch up under the stroking hands.

_I didn't know Slytherins could be so nice_, she thought as Alasdair Young, a first-year boy from one of her classes, knelt down and set his armload of books aside so he could scratch gently behind her ears.

But this assumption turned out to be dangerous. Curfew was fast approaching, and the trickle of passersby turned into a stream. Soon enough, it brought along a boy who was not nice at all. He spied her lurking in a corner across from the entrance and shouted "Hsssst -- you -- cat! Get out of here!" Minerva ignored him, with the supreme dignity that only cats could effectively muster, and he strode over and aimed a kick at her ribs. She dodged, but the attack had startled her, and she bolted without thinking, racing back up the stairs and running flat-out for her own room.

Just as she rounded the final corner, she collided with an unexpected pair of legs, sheered off, skidded on the slick floor, stuck all her claws out for traction and ended up sprawled in the middle of the corridor. Then she saw whom she had hit and quickly changed to human form.

"Sorry, Albus," she said.

"That's quite all right," said Dumbledore, giving her a rather peculiar look. "What have you been up to this evening?"

"Just -- practicing my transformation," she said. Suddenly, she realized that he wasn't alone. His dinner guest was with him. It was a woman - a very attractive woman a few years younger than Dumbledore. She had blue eyes and fair hair with a tinge of red, and she was standing very close to her companion with her arm linked through the crook of his elbow.

Up till this point, Minerva had been too distracted by the abruptness of her departure from the dungeons to think much about anything else. Now a bolt of painful jealousy lanced its way through her entire body, leaving her with icy hands and flaming hot cheeks. What right did this woman have to be hanging on Albus' arm as if she owned him? And what sort of "meeting" had they been having, anyway? Could the two of them be --?

Before Minerva could say anything, the woman let go Dumbledore's arm and stepped forward, holding her hand out and smiling kindly, as if Minerva were a little girl to be treated with mock dignity.

"I'm Arabella Figg," she said.

"Minerva McGonagall," said Minerva stiffly, taking the hand for the shortest possible time she could without being rude. She eyed the woman's immaculate black robes and wished she could adjust her own clothing.

"Yes, I know. Albus has told me all about you. An Animagus at your age! Very impressive. And a cat into the bargain. I adore cats."

_I've had enough people petting me for one evening, thanks very much_, Minerva thought. _Lay a hand on me, and you'll draw back a bloody stump_. Since smiling was the next best thing to baring her teeth, she forced a rather awkward one. "Delighted to meet you," she said.

Dumbledore, no one's fool, noted the look on her face and accurately deduced what it meant. He stepped smoothly up to her side and said, in a voice that somehow managed to be light and hold a note of warning at the same time, "Minerva, Arabella is my cousin. Remember I've mentioned my little cousin Bella, the one who lived on my street when we were children? This is she. Figg is her _married_ name." The emphasis he put on "married" was subtle, but unmistakable, and all at once Minerva felt very, very small and stupid.

"Your cousin?" she repeated. "Oh! Oh, I remember. I see." Flustered now, she gazed wildly at Dumbledore for help, but Arabella was already jumping in to fill the gap.

"You should call me Bella too, dear. You're practically part of the family. Albus sent me ever so many letters about you while you were a student, and even some pictures. I didn't realize you were so grown up now, though."

"Er -" Minerva hunted for words and finally settled on "Thank you." Looking at Bella without the fog of resentment in the way, she could see the Dumbledore family resemblance. Those blue eyes -- they were the same shade as Albus', and the reddish highlights in Bella's hair matched the pure auburn of his. If she hadn't gone leaping to mad conclusions, she would have realized it on her own. She was more than a little alarmed by how instantly and mindlessly she had reacted. Even when surrounded by a pack of other teenage girls in her dormitory, she had never been inclined to jealousy, had never been the way some of them had been, so --"

_So catty. I was being catty. Just like a female cat that smells another female cat in her territory. Oh, my goodness. Am I going to start acting like a cat even when I'm not one? _

"Bella works for the Ministry in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement," Dumbledore was saying now. "She wanted to see you transform -- the Ministry is always very interested in Animagi, and there hasn't been a new one in several years. But as we've already seen you do it, perhaps we should let you go off to bed. It's getting late."

"Of course," Bella said. "Minerva, it was a pleasure,"

"Likewise," said Minerva, looking guiltily at Dumbledore. "Albus, do you suppose I might speak to you alone for just a moment?"

"Certainly. Bella, you remember the way back to my office? Good. The password is 'licorice stick'. Go ahead and I'll join you shortly."

Bella left in a flutter of robes, and Dumbledore turned to Minerva. "Yes?"

"I just wanted to apologize for the way I acted. I thought -"

"I know what you thought," Dumbledore said. "It's quite all right. But I am a little confused by it. It is not at all like you."

"It certainly isn't," said Minerva. "I couldn't help it. I think the cat part of me is spilling over into the human part a bit."

Hmmm. Something else to address in your practice sessions," Dumbledore said. He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the forehead, the kiss of a parent bidding a child goodnight. "And something that can wait until morning. Go to sleep." And he walked away, leaving her alone with her conflicting emotions. In one night, she'd been nervous, bored, triumphant, panicked, jealous, and now humiliated. She was positively worn out from it -- and to top everything off, she hadn't caught so much as a glimpse of Tom.

She wondered briefly why Dumbledore's cousin had come in the first place, and what she -- or the Ministry of Magic -- wanted from him, but decided to think about it later.

_To hell with all of it, for tonight, anyway. I'm going to bed_, she thought, and did.


	11. On The Record

Disclaimer: All the Harry Potter characters still belong to J.K. Rowling and her publishers. But the wizard restaurant belongs to me.  
  
Author's Note: Whew -- finally, a new chapter. I spent most of Saturday afternoon ushering my three-year-old around an amusement park, and as a result, had plenty of thinking time to figure out what should happen next. (I do know what's going to happen ultimately. I wrote the last chapter of this story back around Chapter 6 or so. It's just getting from here to there that's taking some time.) Look for lucky Chapter 13 later this week.  
  
Chapter 12: On The Record  
  
Being overtaken by instinctive cat behavior was odd, and not a little disconcerting, but Minerva refused to let it stop her from doing what she had to. The term was almost over, and she intended to fit in all the spying she could in its remaining weeks, since Tom would be spending the whole summer far out of her reach. And so, as a cat, she trailed him incessantly, in every spare moment she had, throughout the last few days of April, all through May and into the early part of June. But he always seemed to be on some sort of officially sanctioned business, and she was never able to overhear him talking about anything that could get him in trouble.  
  
The one thing she did discover was that Tom's friends treated him with an astonishing amount of respect -- deference that bordered on reverence, far beyond what even a popular boy like Tom warranted. They carried his books for him, filled his cup and gave him first choice of food at mealtimes, and escorted him from class to class in the manner of an honor guard.  
  
*Very odd,* she thought, gazing down from her vantage point high on a library shelf to where he sat surrounded by them, looking for all the world like a young emperor holding court. *What ever can he have done to make them act that way? He's got no money; he can't be buying them off. And he's certainly not winning them over with kindness.* This was true. In contrast to his general air of languid amusement, Tom was often very sharp with the people who were close to him. Amazingly, not one of them seemed to mind.  
  
Though her activities during those spring months failed to help her trap Tom in malfeasance, they did bring a reward: somehow, in the midst of it all, she stopped being frightened of him. More or less, at any rate. Whether it was her growing awareness of her own power, or just the constant proximity to him, she didn't know. Nor did she care, as long as it meant she could walk past him in the corridor without feeling sick and shaky for a quarter-hour afterward. She still loathed him, despised him, lay in bed at night imagining his downfall, but she wasn't afraid. If anything, she almost wished he *would* try to do something to her -- all this watchful waiting ran contrary to her nature, which cried out for swift, decisive action. He wouldn't find her such an easy target again.  
  
In the meantime, her Animagus training continued. Dumbledore had told her that she was nearly finished, and, in fact, they were scheduled to visit the Ministry offices on the first day of summer holidays so she could demonstrate her transformation and officially register herself.  
  
That day, July first, dawned clear for a change, and very hot, so hot that the pair of them were nearly stifled the moment they arrived in Diagon Alley. Minerva had felt a little nervous about going back to the scene of the attack she'd witnessed in December, but all the damage had long since been cleaned up, and the difference in seasons made the memory seem far away.  
  
Anyway, Diagon Alley was only a jumping-off point for their excursion. Dumbledore's cousin Bella had sent a car and driver to pick them up, as one couldn't just go Apparating about the city at will. They got in (breathing identical sighs of relief as the magically cooled air washed over them) and were soon at the Ministry offices, which were housed in an old four-story building not far from the Muggle government's headquarters.  
  
The building was instantly recognizable as a wizard one by virtue of being the only structure on the street that hadn't been touched by bombing. Inside, it smelled strongly of musty, crumbling paper, over-boiled coffee and at least a hundred years' worth of built-up floor polish. The scent was one that Minerva, later in life, would come to think of as the odor of bureaucracy, and to find strangely reassuring. Now, at not quite twenty years old, she just thought it stank. She was sure would smell even worse to her cat nose.  
  
Bella was waiting in the entrance hall, clutching a clipboard and quill. The moment she'd greeted them, she thrust the clipboard into Minerva's hands, saying "You'd better get started now, or we'll be here all day."  
  
"What's all this?" Minerva asked, scanning the sheets and sheets of parchment attached to the board.  
  
"Paperwork," Bella said. "The Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures keeps very close tabs on Animagi. They're only letting me walk you through this process as a special favor -- I'm not one of them -- and they'll be absolutely livid if the paperwork isn't filed properly, so make sure you don't skip any questions. You can sit at that table over there."  
  
Minerva sat, thinking that there was nothing to take the thrill out of an experience like being forced to fill out forms first. The questions started out reasonably enough -- name, date of birth and so forth -- but they went on and on. What was more, some of them were quite impertinently personal.  
  
By the time she reached the last one, it was past lunchtime, and she was starving. She hoped no mice ran across the floor while she was demonstrating her transformation. It would be unspeakably embarrassing to find herself chasing and eating one of them. She'd never done such a thing before, but she was learning to expect the unexpected when it came to being an Animagus.  
  
"All right, I'm finished," she called, putting down the quill and flexing her cramped fingers. Bella, who had been sitting with Dumbledore on the main staircase and having a long, earnest conversation in whispers, came over and flipped through the forms to make sure they were all right.  
  
"You've skipped this one about distinguishing marks," she pointed out, tapping a finger on question 347.  
  
"I haven't got any," said Minerva. This had served her very well so far. There were at least ten other grey-and-black tabby cats at Hogwarts, and to the unpracticed eye, she could have been any one of them.  
  
"Very well," Bella said, scribbling "none" in the space. "Come along. They'll be expecting us upstairs."  
  
As she and Dumbledore followed Bella through the echoing corridors, Minerva found herself feeling unaccountably jittery. Not many people knew that she'd been working on this transformation, and even fewer -- only Dumbledore, Bella, Headmaster Dippet and, because he had begged her, Hagrid -- had seen her do it. The thought of suddenly performing in front of an audience like some sort of circus animal was a bit unnerving. She started to picture a tribunal of grim-faced, black-robed men, looming in the shadows of a huge, pillared chamber and waiting for her to make a mistake.  
  
Fortunately, the real situation couldn't have been any further from this flight of fancy. Instead of a hall of judgment, Bella led them into a cramped conference room where two wizards and one witch sat along one side of a long table. All three looked tired and vaguely put-upon, as if they were used to doing too much work for too little pay, but kind enough. They asked Minerva some of the same questions that were in her huge bundle of paperwork, made a few notes, and then sat back expectantly and waited.  
  
She flicked obligingly into cat form and leapt up onto the table, walking down its length one way, then the other, so they could see both sides of her. There was a brief, unpleasant inspection, during which the witch picked her up and examined her carefully from head to feet, pushing on the pads of her paws to make the claws come out and pulling back her lip to get a look at her teeth (a little burst of cat instinct came along at that moment, and she had to quell the urge to bite the invading fingers). Then one of the wizards said "Very good, you can turn back now," and next thing she knew, she, Dumbledore and Bella were standing out in the corridor again.  
  
"That was it?" she asked, feeling dazed and a little let down.  
  
Bella laughed. "Yes, I'm afraid most of what goes on here isn't terribly exciting. Mostly paperwork and meetings. That's government for you."  
  
"Not unlike academia, in that respect," said Dumbledore. "It's a wonder I manage to teach any classes at all with the amount of time I spend sending letters and filling out student forms. Just wait until you work your way up into my position."  
  
"I'd rather not," Minerva said, grimacing at the memory of that clipboard full of questions.  
  
"Never say never, my dear," Dumbledore replied with a twinkle in his eye. He patted Minerva kindly on the shoulder. "Anyway, despite the dreary anticlimactic nature of the registration process, this truly is a wonderful achievement. I'm very proud of you, and I know your parents would be too, if they were here. We have the rest of the afternoon to help you celebrate. What would you like to do?"  
  
"Eat," said Minerva succinctly. This time both Bella and Dumbledore laughed.  
  
**************************************************************************** *********  
  
Hungry as she was at that point, Minerva would have been glad to consume her celebratory meal standing on the pavement outside a chip shop. Bella, however, insisted that the occasion deserved something nicer, and dragged them off to Le Moment Magie, an extremely snooty wizard-only restaurant in the posh part of town.  
  
It was a lovely place, dimly lit even in midafternoon, with real cloths and napkins on the tables and swarms of live fireflies glimmering in enchanted glass globes around the room. Dumbledore and Bella, well used to eating at such establishments, walked in blithely and settled down to peruse the menu together. Minerva envied their confidence. She'd never had occasion to go anyplace fancier than the Three Broomsticks or the Leaky Cauldron, and she'd started feeling uncomfortable the minute she passed through the carved and gilded doors. When she saw the shocking array of silverware and crystal laid in front of her, she lost her appetite altogether. Meals at school were held in a much more raucous and informal atmosphere, and she was terrified of doing something inappropriate -- especially in front of Bella, who still made her feel slightly jealous and intimidated.  
  
Luckily for her, neither of the older wizards seemed to notice her dismay. They discussed whether they should have squabs or game hens and debated knowledgeably about the relative merits of beluga and ossetra caviar, while Minerva was left to sit bolt upright against the upholstered back of her chair and wonder which fork she should use first. She was beginning to realize that a Hogwarts education, however thorough, left a great deal to be desired in the area of fine dining etiquette. Eventually, she decided that she would just watch Dumbledore and do whatever he did. And she would have fish. She'd developed a strange fondness for fish of late.  
  
Shadowing Dumbledore and trying to eat her fish delicately (the sight and smell of it had brought her appetite howling back again, and she longed to stuff it down as fast as she could) kept her so busy, and so quiet, that her dining companions seemed to forget she was there after a while. Their conversation passed from Animagi to Bella's four cats – Dumbledore's eyes glazed over slightly during this part -- to current affairs at the Ministry, and finally to a German wizard called Grindelwald, of whom Minerva had never heard. Dumbledore and Bella, on the other hand, knew all about him, and were very passionate on the topic.  
  
"You know he's gone Dark, and I know he's gone Dark," Bella was saying, "but unless we can convince the Minister, what good is that knowledge to us?"  
  
"He'll see reason sooner or later. He won't be able to avoid it once the body count climbs high enough," said Dumbledore.  
  
"Oh, capital logic, Albus. Wouldn't you like to do something about him before there's any more loss of life?"  
  
"A question you need hardly ask," Dumbledore said dryly. "But I am not an Auror, and you cannot take the law into your own hands. All we can do is wait. And I hope you don't think I enjoy waiting while my students leave right under my nose and go to join him."  
  
"Yes, but –"At that moment, Bella's gaze fell on Minerva, watching them both wide-eyed over the rim of a water glass, and she stopped short.  
  
"I'm sorry, Minerva, dear," she said with a rather forced smile. "This can't be very interesting for you. Look, Albus, we're boring her to death."  
  
"Not at all," said Minerva. "Who is this Grindelwald person?"  
  
Bella looked at her cousin across the table, and Dumbledore said "I'll tell you about him later. Everything I can tell you, anyway. Now, are you finished with that fish? I hear the chocolate gateau here is excellent."  
  
Though she was rather offended that he thought she could be so easily distracted by cake, Minerva let the waiter banish her plate with a wand- wave. So that was what he and Bella had been meeting about so often over the last month or two -- a Dark wizard. And one who was recruiting Hogwarts students, too.  
  
*I wonder if --* she thought suddenly, remembering her own private mission. *But no, Tom's not involved in Dark magic. Or is he? He is a Slytherin, after all.*  
  
It was definitely worth considering. Nothing cast a shadow on a wizard as quickly as being suspected of dabbling in the Dark Arts. Lost in thoughts of how she might look for evidence of this, and feeling renewed hope of success, Minerva said nothing for the rest of the meal.  
  
To be continued …  
  
"But wait," I hear you saying. "Minerva's cat form does have distinguishing marks. What about those spectacle squares around her eyes?" Yes, she does get those eventually, but not yet. I have my reasons for that.) 


	12. Two Conversations

Disclaimer: The usual.  
  
Author's Note: It's been a while since we've seen things from Dumbledore's point of view. The second half of this chapter has some of that. Hang in there – it's long.  
  
Chapter 13: Two Conversations  
  
It seemed Minerva had been living under a rock for the last year – because the moment Dumbledore explained who Grindelwald was and she began listening for his name, she discovered that he was a hot topic of conversation throughout the school. The rumors about him were endless. He was working with Adolf Hitler, the Muggle dictator. He had an empire of his own. He only wanted to kill Muggles. He only wanted to kill wizards. He wanted to kill both Muggles and wizards. He was in Germany, in England, in France. The only thing that everyone agreed on was that he was bad, and getting worse.  
  
As she was already busy snooping around, it was easy enough to add Grindelwald and his potential followers to her list of topics to inquire about. And now she was taking a much more aggressive approach to those inquiries. Early in the summer, she'd read her way through a pile of Muggle detective stories, and had decided that she'd relied too much on her own observations up to this point. Detectives interrogated people. So would she.  
  
Not ordinary people, though. She began with the castle ghosts, every one from Nearly Headless Nick, whom she knew well from her Gryffindor days, to the old groundskeeper, Willie, who haunted the shed where Ogg and Hagrid kept their gardening supplies. The only two who were less than helpful were the Bloody Baron – he wouldn't say a word against another Slytherin even if his life (or in his case, his afterlife) depended on it – and Myrtle, the poor girl who had been killed the previous year. Myrtle, like many newly created ghosts, had not yet got over the shock and confusion of her death, and was incapable of mustering a human shape or carrying on a coherent conversation. In a year or two, she would surely settle down and get on with the business of being dead. For now, all she could do was drift around, a formless, dolefully wailing blob of ectoplasm. Some of the students had started calling her Moaning Myrtle because of it.  
  
Unfortunately, Dumbledore and Dippet had already spoken with the ghosts and learned the same thing Minerva learned: they had very little useful information to impart. Even though walls and doors were no barriers to them, they tried hard to respect the privacy of the castle's living inhabitants. This was a delicate sentiment indeed, but one that prevented them from picking up the sort of gossip that she could use. She'd asked them – implored them, even – to do a little more eavesdropping, and they'd promised to help, but so far, had come up with nothing.  
  
When she'd exhausted that avenue, she'd turned to another group that also had the run of the castle, and that no one else had yet spoken to for the simple reason that no one else could: the cats. The problem she'd encountered there was that cats, while entirely without scruples when it came to such human niceties as privacy, simply did not care what people did, and therefore didn't pay much attention. Cats were interested in cat things: sleeping, eating and lying in warm places, in that order. You could get them to focus on very little else. Minerva could understand this to a certain extent – she found those pastimes strangely alluring herself when she was in her cat form – but it annoyed her anyway.  
  
In this way the summer had passed. Now it was the first week of October, and she was helping Dumbledore pack to go on a special assignment for the Ministry of Magic. He wouldn't – or couldn't – tell her what it was about, but expected to be gone for at least a week or two.  
  
"You'll have to take my upper-level classes," he said, pushing a huge stack of clean, folded robes into a small leather valise that sat open on his bed. "They shouldn't give you much trouble. The sixth years are working on turning solids into liquids – I had them melt down gold ingots to make jewelry last week – and the seventh years are getting ready to start animating inanimate objects. Hand me some socks, please. They're in the top drawer on the left."  
  
She went to his carved mahogany bureau, opened the drawer with an odd voyeuristic thrill, and started tossing balls of orange and plaid and candy- striped socks to him. Each one dropped into the valise, no matter how wildly she threw it.  
  
"Enough?" she asked after fifteen pairs.  
  
"A few more," he said. "It's damp where I'm going, and I simply can't concentrate on anything when my feet are wet."  
  
They emptied the entire sock drawer in this way. After the last pair had vanished, Dumbledore zipped his bag (which looked no fuller than when they had begun), and picked it up.  
  
"Ugh, it's heavy –" And indeed, he was leaning to one side under its weight.  
  
"Well, there you have it: the price of dry feet," said Minerva with a snicker. "Here." Pulling out her wand, she did a Lightening Charm, and he straightened up again.  
  
"Very good, my dear. If you were still my student, I'd give ten points to Gryffindor. As it is, I'm afraid all I can give you is a stack of essays that need marking."  
  
"You're a cruel man, Albus Dumbledore." She put on her fiercest scowl to make him laugh, and was gratified when it worked. Despite his outward calm, she could tell he was worried about this trip for some reason. That made her worry too.  
  
As they walked down to the Apparition point in Hogsmeade, he filled her in on other things that wanted doing in his classes, from the third years who needed extra practice in turning teapots into tortoises to the fifth years who had two more weeks of cross-species transmogrifications to go. Minerva scribbled it all down on the little notepad she always carried in her pocket, thinking that she'd be busy round the clock trying to get so many lessons ready on such short notice – Dumbledore had been at this long enough to do it all from memory, but she had to put hours of preparation into every class she taught.  
  
"And one other thing," he said, just before they reached their destination. "One of the boys in my seventh-year class has expressed interest in the Animagus transformation. He asked if you would consider showing yours to him. It seems he spoke to Headmaster Dippet about becoming an Animagus, and Dippet told him you had accomplished it."  
  
"Which boy?" Minerva asked, quill at the ready.  
  
"Tom Riddle," said Dumbledore, and her breath immediately caught in her throat.  
  
Can he know I've been watching him? No, how could he? He doesn't even know that I know he's the one who – who hurt me, so why would he suspect me of following him around? Damn the Headmaster. Why did he have to say anything?  
  
But she knew why. Dippet had been overjoyed at the prestige of having an Animagus on his staff, and had hounded her all summer to demonstrate the transformation in front of the whole school at the Welcome Feast. She'd refused steadfastly – even with the thousand and one other cats prowling around the castle, she thought it best for as few people as possible to know what her other form actually looked like. It had gotten very hard to put Dippet off, though. Just a few weeks ago, he'd asked, reasonably enough, "What did you spend all those months learning the transformation for, if not to use it in teaching?"  
  
Minerva hadn't known how to answer that one. And now he'd not only given away her secret, but given it to the one person she least wanted to know.  
  
Dumbledore was watching her very keenly, noting her reaction, and she squirmed under his gaze like a fish on a hook. He'd mentioned Tom to her a few more times after his initial request for her to watch the boy, but she'd never had anything to report – nothing, of course, except for the one thing she couldn't report – and after several months, he'd stopped asking. She knew he was still keeping an eye on Tom himself, had heard Tom complaining to his friends that "the old man" was forever on his back. Clearly he hadn't put his suspicions to rest. Suppose he became suspicious of her, too?  
  
"Minerva?" Dumbledore asked. "Is that all right?  
  
Oh, dear. Suddenly I'm "Minerva" again. No pet names. He's serious.  
  
"Yes," she said with a halfway successful attempt at nonchalance.  
  
"Excellent. Ah, here's Bella." The older woman got up from her seat on the bench reserved for arriving and departing travelers, smoothing down the skirt of her black Muggle-style suit, and greeted them each with a hug. Minerva accepted the embrace rather stiffly. She liked Dumbledore's cousin better now – Bella had come to Hogwarts several times over the summer for private meetings, and she'd turned out to be nice enough, though she never seemed to stop talking about her cats. Still, the idea of her and Dumbledore going off on a secret mission together made Minerva unreasonably jealous all over again. Not because she thought there was anything romantic between them – they were relatives, for goodness' sake – but because she wished she could be the one to help Dumbledore in whatever he was going to do.  
  
It was a ridiculous wish. She knew that. Bella had been with the Ministry of Magic for fifty years and was clearly more qualified for any sort of assignment than a second-year, part-time teacher who would not even see her twentieth birthday for another two weeks. But it was impossible to squelch.  
  
Bella, who was almost as good as Dumbledore at reading people, seemed to understand this instinctively, and offered Minerva an encouraging smile.  
  
"So you'll be holding down the fort for Albus," she said. "I expect you'll have all his students in better shape than he left them when we get back."  
  
"He'll be lucky if I haven't killed any of them," said Minerva. "Or myself."  
  
"You'll be fine," Dumbledore said. He looked up at the station clock. "We don't need to leave for another half-hour. Would you like to wait with us, or head back to the castle?"  
  
"Head back. I've got work to do. Have a safe trip, both of you."  
  
The two of them watched for a minute as she started back up the path and disappeared around the bend. When she had gone, Bella said "I'm glad to see she's decided not to scratch my eyes out after all."  
  
Dumbledore laughed and let go of his bag, which, thanks to Minerva's Lightening Charm, continued to drift gently at knee level. "She was terribly guilty about that, you know. She couldn't help it – she doesn't want anyone to come between us."  
  
"Well, I can see why she wouldn't. I mean, apart from the obvious fact of her being madly in love with you, you're her closest friend, aren't you? Didn't she have any friends at school?"  
  
"She was friendly with some of the other Gryffindor girls in her year," said Dumbledore, "but I don't think they've kept in touch. Most of them have already married, and they haven't much in common now."  
  
"Aha, you see. It must be hard for her, being so much younger than all the professors, but not able to socialize with the students because she has to teach them. No wonder she relies on you. I don't doubt it seems natural to her anyway. Look at how she was brought up, in the middle of nowhere with only her father for company. And a fine companion I'm sure he was."  
  
"He loved her," Dumbledore said. "More than anything."  
  
"I don't doubt it," said Bella, "but how often do you suppose he ever showed it? He taught me Potions when I was a student here. You had to half kill yourself in class to wring so much as a 'well done' out of him. Getting affection and approval from you – it must have been like a thunderstorm in the desert for the poor girl."  
  
"Be that as it may, she doesn't talk to me the way she used to. In fact, she's been acting peculiar for a long time – ever since she started teaching, or even a bit before that. I thought at first that she was only embarrassed about her feelings for me, trying to hide them, but after all that came out into the open it was the same. I run into her in the oddest places, all over the castle, and she looks at me as if she's been caught stealing when we meet. Then she goes quiet and faraway and won't tell me what's bothering her when I ask."  
  
"She needs another woman to confide in," said Bella knowingly. "All girls that age do. A female friend, or a mother." She saw her cousin's speculative look and held up both hands in a warding-off gesture, laughing. "Oh, no, Albus. Not me. I was hopeless as a mother; you know that. It's only because of our housekeeper that Christopher and Louisa turned out all right. As soon as they were grown, I vowed to stick to cats till the end of my days."  
  
"You aren't so bad as all that," said Dumbledore. "You could invite her over for tea one afternoon. If you served her a few cups of your special brew, she'd tell you her entire life story." Bella was famous for fortifying her tea with lump sugar and single-malt Scotch. Everyone who knew her had learned to nurse a single cup, very slowly, to avoid being light-headed for the rest of the afternoon.  
  
"I'll think about it. It's not that I don't like the girl. Under all that prickliness, she really seems rather sweet. I just don't know that I'm the right person for her to tell her troubles to."  
  
"I don't know that I am either," said Dumbledore. "I've never wished so much that her own mother were still alive."  
  
"How did her mother die?" Bella asked. "I remember you telling me back when you first brought her to school that her father had passed away, but never what happened to her mother."  
  
Dumbledore sat down on the bench, leaving his bag to orbit in a small circle by itself. "I try not to think of it," he said. "It was most … unfortunate."  
  
"I'm listening," said Bella. She sat next to him.  
  
"Very well. Minerva's mother, Alison, was only eighteen when she met Malcolm McGonagall. Who, I might add, was a hundred and twenty at the time. She wasn't a student at Hogwarts, thank goodness – can you imagine the scandal? It causes enough difficulties when the younger professors run off with their students."  
  
"Yes, I remember a few of those from my own schooldays."  
  
"As do I. Anyway, Alison and Malcolm married that same year, probably because Minerva was on the way, though Malcolm never shared that particular bit of information with me. The minute Minerva was born, he bought a house up on a mountain in the Highlands, and all three of them went there, and there they stayed. Malcolm had never been much for society, if you recall, and once he had a family he saw no need to interact with anyone else, ever. And I think Alison must have felt – well, trapped. She'd been a young girl having an exciting, forbidden love affair, and suddenly she was an old man's wife and the mother of a baby, living cut off from everything she knew."  
  
"It couldn't have been easy," Bella agreed. "So what happened?"  
  
"Well, she did love Malcolm, deeply, and she would have known that it would devastate him if she left – she was the only thing he'd ever cared for more than his potions, except for Minerva. I suppose she didn't want to bear the guilt of seeing him suffer. So one night, after he was asleep, she went down into the basement where he did his work and drank poison from his own store of ingredients. She killed herself, Bella. She was only twenty-four, and Minerva had just turned five. Minerva doesn't remember her anymore, except in bits and fragments, and she doesn't know the truth about how she died. Malcolm only told her that her mother had been ill."  
  
"I see …" Bella said. "And you think that if Alison were here, she would have a few choice words for her daughter on the wisdom of yearning after a man a hundred years her senior?"  
  
"Exactly right," said Dumbledore. "Among other things."  
  
"Oh, Albus," said Bella softly. "Well, I'll – I'll see what I can do when we come back from this assignment."  
  
"If we come back."  
  
"Yes, if."  
  
A moment of silence, then:  
  
"Albus, I hate to ask it, but you don't think she's involved in … well, in anything dark, do you? Could that be the secret she's keeping from you?"  
  
"No," said Dumbledore. "Not that. Not Minerva. Never Minerva."  
  
To be continued …  
  
More author's note: I know this chapter had a lot of talking in it. You'll be pleased to discover that the next one is almost all action. 


	13. Black Watch

Disclaimer: The usual  
  
Author's Note: Meanwhile, back at the ranch …  
  
Chapter 14: Black Watch  
  
"It's not my fault! He made me do it."  
  
"I did not, you baby. It was your idea in the first place."  
  
"Quiet, both of you!" said Minerva in exasperation. "Mr. Barnett, I highly doubt that Mr. MacGinnis forcibly dragged you to the kitchens at midnight and stuffed your mouth with ice cream and fudge sauce. And Mr. MacGinnis, even if it was Mr. Barnett's idea, you didn't have to go along with it."  
  
They'd reached their destination – the Ravenclaw common room entrance – by then, she propelling the two miscreants in front of her all the way. Now she pointed to the door firmly. "Back inside – fifteen points off for each of you, and another ten for being repeat offenders – and I'm telling Professor Ailnoth in the morning."  
  
The boys went sheepishly inside, one of them muttering to the other "How does she do it? It's like she comes out of nowhere."  
  
"And be sure you wash before you get in bed!" Minerva shouted after them. "You're sticky!"  
  
The door slammed on the last word. She blew out an irritated sigh and started making her way back down the staircase. This was only the fifth week of the term, and already she'd caught that pair out of bed six times. Professor Ailnoth was too soft on the Ravenclaws, she thought. If she were in charge, she'd – well, never mind.  
  
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she headed back toward the kitchens, intending to warn the house-elves to be on the lookout for the perpetually hungry Barnett and MacGinnis. She'd found herself doing this sort of thing more and more lately. Patrolling the halls as a cat , though it still hadn't yielded the results she wanted, had made her every out-of-line student's worst nightmare. It was almost ridiculously easy to catch them – she'd pad along silently in their wake, then turn human when they weren't looking and nab them in a flash. Not that she wanted to be the Hallway Police, especially when she had her own business to take care of; she just couldn't let misbehavior slide when she saw it. Anyway, she thought, it was for their own safety. If anyone knew what sorts of unpleasant things could happen to a student walking around alone late at night, she did.  
  
On the note of unpleasant things, she wondered, for the thousandth time, how she was going to avoid exposing her Animagus form to Tom. Dumbledore had only been away for two days, and she'd been able to skirt the issue so far – but she had to teach the seventh-year Transfiguration class tomorrow, and there Tom would be, with no avoiding him.  
  
Just then, Dippet's Siamese cat, Isolde, came scampering along the corridor and stopped in front of Minerva. She yowled loudly. Minerva switched to cat form to talk to her.  
  
*There you are!* Isolde was saying. *I've been looking for you.*  
  
*Why?* Minerva asked without much interest. Once she'd started communicating with Isolde, she'd learned that the other cat was the feline equivalent of those matchmaking women who wanted to pair off the world. She was forever suggesting one tomcat or another as a suitable partner for Minerva, no matter how often Minerva explained that she had not the slightest romantic interest in cats. Probably Isolde had found a new specimen to parade in front of her.  
  
*You asked me a while ago to tell you if any of the humans were meeting in secret*, Isolde said. *Well, a pack of them are, right now. I saw them. They're up in the tower.*  
  
*Where? Which tower?*  
  
*The tall one.*  
  
Minerva felt her hackles rise in frustration. Though Isolde, like all cats, could find her way nearly anywhere, she wasn't very good at giving directions.  
  
*Isolde, there are four towers here. Six if you count the ones in the barbican. All of them are tall. I need more to go on than that.*  
  
*The one with the good afternoon sunshine. In the corridor where the bits- and-pieces windows are. I don't want to go back. The humans frightened me.*  
  
*You don't have to go back*, Minerva said. *I need you to take a message for me.*  
  
*A message! No. I don't carry messages. Get an owl.*  
  
*You have to. There's no time to go looking for owls. All you have to do is go home, to Dippet's rooms, and let him read it; then you can stay there where it's safe.* Without waiting for the cat to agree or decline, Minerva switched quickly back to human form, took her pad and quill out of her pocket, scribbled a note to Dippet and stuck it to Isolde's blue velvet collar with an adhesion charm. But she hadn't reckoned on feline stubbornness.  
  
*I won't!* said Isolde. *I won't, I won't!* And she ran off in the opposite direction from the way Minerva wanted her to go.  
  
*Come back here!* Minerva yelled, to no avail. All she saw was Isolde's long tail vanishing round a distant corner.  
  
*Wretched beast!* she thought fiercely, pacing anxiously from one side of the hallway to the other. What was she going to do? If she went and fetched Dippet herself, whoever was meeting secretly in the West Tower might be gone when they got there. Then she would look silly. If she went alone, though – but surely it would be all right. She'd gotten top marks in Defense Against The Dark Arts, and been a solid member of the dueling team, though not the best. She could protect herself. And anyway, it might turn out to be nothing but some students who had sneaked up there to drink and fool around. The Astronomy Tower was the usual venue of choice for that sort of thing, but perhaps they'd decided the hooting of the owls in the Owlery overhead would be romantic.  
  
Her mind made up, she tore off in the direction of the West Tower. Isolde had been right when she said it had good afternoon sun. Starting around two o'clock, you could find half the cats in the castle there, lying spread out in the corridor she had mentioned with the colored light from the stained- glass windows playing over their fur. Minerva had spent a few afternoons there herself during the summer. There were several rooms opening off it, but only one, a small, bare one halfway down its length, was ever unlocked.  
  
She got to the tower in two minutes flat and slunk up the stairs to the third floor, sides heaving with the effort of her run. The beautiful windows were black in the darkness now, their pictures of knights and ladies lost until sunrise. Over the owl noises drifting down from above, she could hear voices coming from the room she had thought of, and she edged as close as she could to the door, lowering her head so her sensitive ears were as close as possible to the crack underneath it. Low though the voices were, she could pick out enough words to make her eyes go wide.  
  
"Grindelwald needs … on the inside …"  
  
"… loyal? If you're not …"  
  
"Only a few of you at first. Then later …"  
  
"… of course … reward … he always …"  
  
"… what we need to do, and we'll do it."  
  
"You can … on us."  
  
*Gods above. Albus and Bella were right,* she thought. *Someone really is recruiting people here to work for Grindelwald* She hadn't been able to recognize any of the voices, but at least some of them sounded young enough to be among the older students.  
  
Suddenly, the voices began to move closer to the door, and she flattened herself to the ground in fright for a moment. They were leaving.  
  
*I have to stop them.* Looking around wildly, she saw an alcove a few feet to the right of the door. It looked as if it had been made to hold one of Hogwarts' many suits of armor, which meant it was large enough to hold her in her human form. Just before the door opened, she scooted over to it, transformed, and pulled her wand out of her pocket, holding it vertically against her chest with both hands and mentally flipping through possible plans of action. Running for help would do no good – they would get away. Calling for help would be even worse – there were too many of them, and they would overpower her before anyone came. Finally, she settled on a strategy that was simple and drew on her advantage of surprise. First she would let them get past her. Then she would take out as many as she could from behind, by stealth. Then she would fight the ones that were left. It could work – and if she were lucky, Isolde would think better of her decision and take the message to Dippet after all.  
  
She hadn't figured it out a moment too soon, because now the first person hove into view, moving silently and swathed from head to foot in a hooded black cloak. It was one of the eeriest sights she'd ever seen.  
  
This figure turned out to be leading a line of five. As they approached, she shrank back as far into the alcove as she could, willing the shadows to cover her up and wishing she'd studied invisibility magic instead of taking that useless extra year of Divination.  
  
*Just keep walking, all of you. Don't notice me. Don't look at me. I'm not here.*  
  
One by one, the figures passed, cloak hoods drawn so closely around their faces that they looked like monks on their way to midnight services in the chapel. The last one went by a little closer to the wall than its companions, and its fluttering sleeve brushed against her arm, soft and ticklish as a cobweb. She squeezed her eyes shut in disgust at the touch. A droplet of cold, panicky sweat slid down the side of her face. Her fingers tightened on her wand.  
  
*Not yet – wait –*  
  
They were all moving on now, ten feet away, fifteen feet, twenty, at the head of the stairs, beginning to descend. This was her chance. With Professor Wulfstan's advice on dueling – "Disarm and disable, children, disarm and disable!" – echoing in her head, she drew a deep breath, stepped out of her hiding place and leveled her wand at the black-clad backs.  
  
"Stupefy!" she hissed under her breath, and the two closest figures stiffened and collapsed in their tracks. "Expelliarmus! Accio wands!" A pair of wands flew up and out from the fallen bodies. She reached to catch them. That was where her plan began to unravel. Instead of dropping into her outstretched hand, the wands glanced off her fingertips, fell onto the flagstones with a clatter, and spun away across the floor  
  
The sound seemed to echo through the vault of the tower forever, so loudly that the remaining figures couldn't help but hear it. One of them whirled in a billow of cloak to confront the unexpected attacker while the other two hurried on down the stairs. As stealth was futile at this point, Minerva cried "Stupefy! Stupefy! Stupefy!" at the top of her lungs and swept her own wand in a half-circle at the entire group. She managed to tag the one facing her and make it stagger, but the others were moving too fast for her to zero in on them.  
  
"Leave them! Come on!" shouted one of the retreating figures. To Minerva's amazement, it was a female voice, high, clear and completely unfamiliar. The half-stunned figure wavered briefly, then abandoned its fallen companions and fled on unsteady legs.  
  
For a minute, she thought she was going to get close enough to try another attack. Their lead was too great, however, and they reached the bottom of the staircase just as she set foot on the top step. In unison, two of them raised their wands and brought them crashing down on the handrails, shouting something incoherent. Minerva had just enough time to wonder what they were trying to accomplish before a violent shudder traveled up the rails to where she stood, and, with a crack and a rumble, the entire staircase split away from the landing, leaving her teetering on the edge above a sheer drop to the second floor below.  
  
She grabbed instinctively for the truncated rail nearest her, losing hold of her own wand in the process, and slowly, painfully, started to haul herself back over the brink. Then the staircase gave another jerk. Her scrabbling fingers lost their purchase, and she toppled backward into empty air.  
  
There were half a dozen things she could have done to cushion the imminent blow, but at the moment her feet left the top step, what flashed through her mind was something Dumbledore had said to her on the dock months before: *Suppose you were falling and had to transform? Now we know you could.*  
  
Seizing on that, she switched into her cat form as the ceiling dropped away from her and the floor rushed closer, feeling her entire body twist automatically in midair and right itself just before she landed. All four of her feet struck the flagstones with a loud crunching sound, as if each had landed in a giant bowl of cornflakes. Searing agony shot upward from the impact points – the pain of splintering bones, of exploding joints, a pain that filled up the world and sent darkness swirling around her.  
  
Somehow, she managed to change back into human form, with the thought that she would be able to call for help. As it turned out, however, she couldn't suck in a large enough breath to do so. Another immense pain blossomed underneath her ribs when she tried, like a sharpened broomstick handle stabbing her in the chest. She coughed, felt some sort of hot, foamy liquid run from the corner of her mouth, and subsided onto the floor, where she lay still, listening to her own labored breathing. It had a wheezy leaking- tire whistle in it. In. Wheeze. Out. Whistle. Over and over.  
  
*I'm dying.* The idea wasn't as terrifying as one might expect. At least it would mean an end to this torment. But if she died now, then there would be no one to say what had happened here. That wouldn't do. Someone had to report to Dippet. And she wanted to see Albus one more time, even if only to tell him goodbye – a selfish desire, yes, but it gave her the incentive to hang on a little longer.  
  
In the distance, she heard children's voices, too young to be those of the conspirators, and thought *What are students doing here? They're supposed to be in bed, and then *Oh no, they're going to be so frightened when they see me.* The voices drew nearer, rising shrilly into near-hysteria. Then hands touched her and the pain, which she had believed could grow no worse, did anyway. She drifted away to escape it.  
  
To be continued …  
  
More author's note: I'm not holding the next chapter hostage by any means, but I do need some honest feedback. Every time I think I know how many chapters there are left to go, something crops up that I have to add to my list. Is it getting too convoluted? Do things still make sense? Should I even continue through all the twists and turns, or just skip to the end? I'd love to hear what you think. (No matter what, the next chapter will be up within a few days.) 


	14. Eight Lives Left

Disclaimer: The usual. Author's Note: Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! It was a great help. I can't say for sure that I know how many chapters this will be, but I'm sure now that it will be as many as it takes. This is a very long chapter for me – hope you enjoy it. 

A couple of individual notes: Sasha, just so you know, I had already written most of this chapter before I read your wonderful Le Coeur story. Let me tell you, I gulped when I got to your infirmary scene. I swear any similarities between that one and this one are totally coincidental. People do go to the infirmary a lot in the Potterverse, don't they? I never went that often when I was in school. Of course, I was too busy sitting around reading to get hurt. =) Mayfair, regarding a hookup – I'm not ruling it out. D and McG have a long, long history together. Anything could happen during all those years. We'll just have to wait and see …

Anyway, thanks again for the reviews, and on with the story! Next chapter to come by the weekend.

Chapter 15: Eight Lives Left 

It wasn't complete unconsciousness. Unfortunately. That would have been greatly preferable to this floating in-between state, in which she could hear and feel, but do nothing to help herself.

Someone's voice said "Let's move her – carefully, now – one, two, three." She was lifted, swung to the side with agony flaring in every part of her broken body, and lowered onto a surface much more forgiving than the floor had been. Another voice said "Wipe up that blood, I keep slipping in it," and even through the pain she was able to think _I could have done without hearing THAT._

A green burst of wand light flared in front of her closed eyelids. 

"Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?" That was Madam Valerian, the nurse. 

"I can't breathe," she managed to hiss out on the slight bit of air that was available to her. It felt as if there were a tight iron band encircling her chest. This must be what drowning was like, or being buried alive.

"No?" Fingers probed at her side. "I can fix that." Madam Valerian muttered a spell. Suddenly, the iron band was gone, and with a great gasping noise, Minerva sucked in what felt like her first full breath in hours. To her utter shame, she used it to scream. She had to. The pain was too much for her to do anything else. She screamed for Dumbledore and her father and her mother and all the deities whose names she'd ever heard, for anyone who might be able to stop it.

"Hush, dear, you're making it worse. We're going to help you. Try to be quiet." But Minerva couldn't. In a moment she ran out of people to call for and just shrieked wordlessly. Madam Valerian was right – screaming did make it worse – but there seemed to be no way to stop. It wasn't a question of courage, or lack of it; the pain was so huge and elemental that it washed concepts like courage away on its tide.

"Poppy, hand me the vial – no, the amber one. I hate to put her out when she's so weak, but we haven't got any choice." She felt a gentle hand under the back of her head, lifting it just a few inches, and a few drops of some bitter liquid ran down her throat. The taste was green, like freshly crushed leaves. Still tasting it, she sank down, into real darkness this time.

************************************************************

When she woke again, she was tucked tightly into a narrow bed at the rear of the infirmary. All her limbs still seemed to be attached, though very sore and weak. Carefully, she stretched and flexed them to make sure they worked. The friction of the crisp white sheets against them was a little painful, but reassuring at the same time – it meant she wasn't paralyzed or irreversibly nerve-damaged.

"Oh, you're awake," said a voice to her left. She turned her head to discover Madam Valerian's assistant, Poppy, gathering what looked like a stack of bed linens from a cupboard.

"I have to –" she started, then stopped and tried to clear her throat. Her voice was harsh and rusty as a crow's. "I have to talk to Headmaster Dippet. Or Professor Dumbledore. I have to tell them –"

"What happened to you? Dippet knows, or at least he seems to. He's been here already. He didn't say much, just that he was handling things and he'd come back to see you when you were stronger."

"And what about Professor Dumbledore?"

Poppy shrugged. "He's still away on his trip. Dippet sent him an owl last night, right after you came in."

"Oh," Minerva said in bitter disappointment. Somehow she had thought, had hoped, that he would be here already. But that was stupid. He was on important business. He couldn't drop everything and come running home right away.

"How long have I been here?" she asked, not wanting to think about that anymore.

"About twelve hours." Poppy put her burden down on a nearby chair and walked over to inspect her patient. "How do you feel?"

"As if I fell thirty feet onto a stone floor," Minerva said wryly. "How do I look?"

"Not bad, considering the circumstances. You had three broken ribs. One of them punctured your left lung and collapsed it. That's why you couldn't breathe properly. You also broke both your legs and your left arm, in several places. Shattered them, really. Compound fractures. And –" She was about to continue the litany of injury, but didn't get a chance, because Minerva suddenly remembered the terrible crunching-cornflakes noise she had heard when she landed on the floor.

_That was my legs breaking_, she thought, and had to clap her uninjured hand over her mouth to keep from being sick all over herself.

"Never mind, I don't want to know any more," she said when she thought it was safe to take her hand away.

"I don't blame you," said Poppy. "Anyway, Dippet wouldn't tell us how you happened to fall, but he told us not to let anyone in to see you or to say that you were here. He said you weren't to tell us anything either, until you'd talked to him or Dumbledore."

"Well, I'm ready whenever he is," Minerva said.

She waited all that afternoon for someone to come, but no one did, unless you counted Poppy and Madam Valerian, who seemed to be in there, fussing about, every hour on the hour. The afternoon wore on toward evening as she lay in bed, watching a square of sunlight from the window moving across the wall opposite her and feeling both restless and lonely. She would have settled for talking to Dippet – she was on fire to tell someone what she'd seen last night and find out what had happened since – but the person she really wanted to see was Dumbledore. Surely Dippet would have asked him to come back for something this important. Surely he would have come back anyway when he heard she was hurt. Wouldn't he?

Eventually, Madam Valerian came in to tell her that she was going down to the Great Hall for dinner in a few minutes, but that Poppy would be there if she needed anything. Minerva watched her bustling around the room, lighting the candles and oil lamps against the growing darkness. They cast tall, wavering shadows that reached halfway to the moldings encircling the plastered ceiling.

_I won't ask if anyone's heard from Albus_, she decided. _When he comes, I don't want them to say I was whining after him like a child._

That resolution lasted until Madam Valerian finished her work and started to leave. Just as she reached the door, Minerva blurted out "Wait – please wait!"

"Yes, dear?" the nurse asked kindly, turning back.

"Professor Dumbledore – Poppy said Headmaster Dippet had sent him an owl. Has he answered yet? Is he coming?"

Madam Valerian frowned slightly. "I really don't know. You'll have to ask the Headmaster. I'm surprised he hasn't been in to talk to you yet. He's been very busy all day, though. People from the Ministry are here. Aurors."

"All right," said Minerva, sinking back into the pillows. "Thank you."

"Don't worry about it, dear. I'm sure everything is being taken care of," Madam Valerian said, and left. 

Minerva went back to waiting. Without even the poor entertainment of the sunlight to keep her occupied, she fell asleep that way.

*************************************************************

"Wake up, Tabby," Dumbledore said softly, and she opened her eyes to see the faint outline of him in the dark, just as he lit the candles on her bedside table with his wand. In the sudden flare of light, he looked so dreadfully tired and worried that she forgot to be upset that he'd taken so long in coming. She held out her one good arm, and he bent down to give her a very careful hug. 

"I wondered when you would get here," she said, slightly muffled against the collar of his cloak. It was cold, and smelled of the outdoors – he must have come straight to the infirmary upon arriving.

"I came as soon as I could." He let go of her and pulled up a chair so he could sit beside the bed. "Bella said she could carry on without me. And it sounds as if all the action has been here, at any rate. Armando told me what happened, and how badly you were hurt." His voice was as calm as it ever was, but Minerva saw a distinct wetness in his eyes. She had never known him to shed a tear in their nine-year acquaintance. The possibility of it happening now horrified her. To forestall it, she tried a little humor.

"Just imagine, I played Quidditch for four years without hurting myself once, and here I am practically in bits because of a stair-climbing accident," she said. "What do you suppose the odds of that are?"

"I wouldn't put any money on it," said Dumbledore. "But it wasn't exactly an accident, was it? Someone tried to kill you. Now I want you to tell me your version of the story."

She told him, from start to finish, omitting nothing except the fact that Isolde had reported the secret meeting to her on standing instructions to mention any unusual activity.

"And I have no idea what happened after that," she finished. "The Headmaster hasn't told me anything. I haven't even seen him. Do you know?"

"They were Grindelwald sympathizers," Dumbledore said. "You knew that part. Two of them were definitely Hogwarts students. They were taken into custody in the West Tower last night. A third was seen running across the grounds, but escaped before anyone could stop him."

"Or her," Minerva said. "At least one of them was a woman, or maybe a girl – her voice sounded young – so some of the others might have been as well." The effort of talking made her cough, and she flinched as renewed pain flared in her damaged ribcage. "The two you got were the first ones I stunned. I didn't hit the third one hard enough to keep him or her down. There wasn't time to aim properly."

"I'm impressed anyway," Dumbledore said. "Striking three out of five is excellent for one person acting alone."

Disappointed though she was that she hadn't gotten every one of them, Minerva felt a warm flush of pride at this praise. Perhaps she'd done well enough after all. "Who _were_ the two you caught, anyway?" she asked, hoping, almost expecting, that one of them would be Tom.

"Jeremy Javits and Stephen Cooke," said Dumbledore. "And we believe Benjamin Savard was one of those that escaped. No one has seen him since dinner last night. The other two were not students – everyone else has been accounted for and their whereabouts at the time of the incident confirmed by the Aurors."

Minerva frowned. "But Jeremy and Stephen are in Ravenclaw," she said, "and Benjamin is a Hufflepuff. I thought –" 

"What, that they would be Slytherins?" Taking off his glasses, Dumbledore rubbed his eyes tiredly, then looked down at her with a very serious expression. "Minerva, if you are going to go around fighting evil, as you seem determined to do, you will have to stop thinking that it is predictable. It isn't. Slytherin House has turned out many excellent wizards, including a number of Aurors, and the other three Houses have produced their share of villains and cowards."

"I know, but everyone says –"

"Yes, everyone does," said Dumbledore, "but that doesn't make it true. Children believe what everyone says, Minerva. Adults form their own opinions." His voice softened. "I haven't come here to lecture you. You did very well last night. I only wish I could tell everyone just how well."

"What do you mean?"

"Armando and I discussed the situation with the Hogwarts regents, and together, we decided that the best thing to do for the moment was to cover up this incident. Most people are already terrified of Grindelwald, and if they knew he was trying to establish a presence at Hogwarts, they would want to pull their children out of school immediately. We might have been able to calm them at another time, but after the Chamber of Secrets incident a year and a half ago, we lost a great deal of credibility. The Aurors have performed Memory Charms on almost everyone who heard what happened last night. Only you, I, and Armando know the whole truth. Madam Valerian and Poppy know as much as they need to know."

"But is that wise? Shouldn't we tell everyone, so they know what to watch out for?"

"That is the course of action we have decided upon," said Dumbledore in rather formal tones, and she realized that the subject was not open for discussion.

"I see," she said. She settled down in bed again and yawned, closing her eyes involuntarily as sleepiness started to creep up on her. Then she remembered something and looked over at him again. "There's one other thing. I thought I heard some students' voices while I was lying there on the floor. Young ones. Are they all right? Did I just imagine them?"

"You did not," Dumbledore said. "While Grindelwald's followers were on their way down the tower stairs, Alexander Barnett and John MacNair were on their way up with an extremely large bag of food they'd liberated from the kitchen. Apparently a member of staff had caught them down there earlier and escorted them back to the Ravenclaw dorm." His eyes glinted with sly humor. "I wonder who that staff member might have been?"

"Me," said Minerva resignedly. 

"Yes. So they decided to try moving the location of their feast to somewhere more private. They thought they were caught when they saw people coming down the stairs, but relieved when no one paid them any attention. They went on up, and at the second-floor landing, they found you. Alexander stayed with you while John went to fetch Madam Valerian, who collected Armando on her way to the tower. Armando owled me as soon as they'd brought you here. 

"Well, I'm not pleased that they were out wandering around again, but I'm very glad they wandered in my direction," Minerva said.

"They seemed to know you would feel that way," Dumbledore said. "They've already had their memories modified, but they asked to be allowed to write you a get-well letter first. Here it is." He removed a rather grubby-looking piece of parchment from his pocket, unrolled it and held it up so she could read it by the candlelight.

_Dear Miss McGonagall, _it said:

_We're sorry we were out of our dorm after you told us to stay inside. But not to sorry because it meant we were there to help you. You looked awful all smashed up with blood on your face. Madam Valerian says you'll be fine though. Anyway, get better soon, and if you want to take some more points off us when you wake up, it's all right._

_Alexander and John_

Minerva wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry at this missive. She ended up doing a little of both.

"It must have been Alexander who wrote the bit about being smashed up," she said when she was calmer. "He's very interested in that sort of thing. Ask him about air raids sometime."

"I will make a point of doing so," Dumbledore said gravely. Suddenly, he looked over at the window and smiled. "I think you have a visitor."

"What, at the window? Who could it – oh! Let him in, please!"

Dumbledore went over to the window, opened it, and stepped back quickly as a white blur came swooping through it and over to the bed.

"Sorry, Sugar," Minerva said. "I didn't mean to miss visiting you tonight. I've been a bit busy with other things."

Sugar hopped onto her pillow and looked down at her.

_The Owlery owls told me you'd been getting yourself in trouble. Honestly! Are you trying to drive me into an early grave with your antics? Look at me! I'm molting from the stress. You could have been killed! Then what would I do?_ His wings flapped furiously. Unaware that she was on the receiving end of a severe owl scolding, Minerva reached up and scratched underneath one of them.

"It's a good thing it's me who's hurt and not you," she told him. "You'd make a dreadful patient, I'm sure. Here, lift up that other wing and I'll take care of it, too."

_Don't try to distract me with petting,_ Sugar complained. _I'm still very – oooohhh. Oh, that's just the spot. What was I saying? Never mind. Just don't frighten me like that again, girl. I'm not a chick anymore, you know._

"I think I'll leave you two alone," Dumbledore said, smiling again. "I'll be here to see you first thing in the morning. Sleep well." He left as Minerva continued lavishing attention on her companion. Long before Sugar had had as much as he wanted, she got tired and had to stop. Too bad she couldn't scratch under her own skin. The places where her shattered bones were still mending itched like mad.

"You'll stay for a while, won't you, Sugar?" she asked.

_Of course I will, silly thing._ He ruffled his feathers all over, letting his golden eyes go half-lidded as his head sunk down in preparation for sleep. _I told you, you should have been an owl. We never fall._

_********************************************************************_

Madam Valerian insisted that Minerva stay in the infirmary for the rest of the week to make sure that her newly repaired injuries were going to stay that way.

"You didn't see yourself when you came in," she said when Minerva tried to tell her that she was well enough to go back to work, or at least to rest in her own room. "You were in as many pieces as a jigsaw puzzle. Took me ages to put you back together. I'll not have all that work going to waste. Lie down!"

Minerva did, torn between frustration at her imprisonment in the antiseptic-and-medicine-smelling infirmary and relief that she could avoid the whole Tom-Animagus issue a little longer. In a way, the enforced rest was nice. As Dumbledore reminded her so often, she tended to neglect herself in pursuit of her goals, and three days of eating and sleeping well did her a world of good. 

Meals were mostly the way she marked time during those days, with long, luxurious naps to pass the hours in between. All this daytime sleeping left her awake late into the night – but she had an eager companion in Poppy. The other girl was being married in the spring, which meant weddings and all the paraphernalia surrounding them were her favorite topic, and as Minerva was not far from her own age and a captive audience, she seized the opportunity of having her there to ask her opinion on everything from color schemes to china patterns. 

Minerva knew less than nothing about any of those things, but the discussions were a pleasant distraction from spying, fighting dark wizards and recovering from multiple broken bones. So she looked at pictures of Poppy's favorite dress styles and discussed the weighty question of whether to serve beef, chicken or fish at the reception ("Fish," said Minerva, who still found herself craving the stuff at odd moments), and even joined in some slightly giggly speculation about the wedding night and what _that_ would be like. She carefully avoided mentioning the blood and bruises that had been the only mementos of her own experience in that department – there was no point in scaring the other girl. Besides, it would surely be different for Poppy, since she would be with someone who loved her and wished only for her pleasure. 

Later that night, after Poppy had announced that it was time for her to sleep and put out the lights, Minerva lay alone in her narrow bed, mulling that over. She could scarcely imagine what it would be like to be touched with real love, but it sounded so sweet and romantic that it brought tears to her eyes and an ache to her chest. If only …

Turning over, she buried her face in the pillows so Poppy wouldn't hear her and come back. Poppy was a born comforter, and she would try to hug her and soothe her and make her tell why she was crying. And Minerva didn't want to. Her problems were her own. She didn't intend to share them with anyone. Not her romantic problems, not her investigative problems. None of them.

Had she but known it, someone had plans to make her do just that.

To be continued … 


	15. Arabella Attempts An Approach

**Disclaimer: The usual.**

Chapter 16: Arabella Attempts An Approach 

Arabella Dumbledore Figg stood in the rear bathroom of her house, dipping her cats one by one into a galvanized metal tub of Flee vermin repellent. The stuff was thick and green and wobbly as a batch of half-congealed lime jelly, and not one of the cats had been willing to put a paw in it. 

Bella had tried stroking and coaxing, but when that hadn't worked, she'd simply taken out her wand and cast a somnolence spell on them. Better for them to just sleep through it, she thought, lifting Tufty out of the tub and laying her tenderly on a fluffy blue towel next to Tibbles. They shed like mad when they were subjected to too much stress. She didn't care about the fur getting on things – every surface in the house was protected by anti-cling spells that worked wonderfully, if you didn't mind getting a slight electric shock every time you touched something made of metal – but she always wanted to cry at the sight of the poor creatures going around with bald patches on their hindquarters.

As she worked, she mulled over the best way to discharge her duty to Albus. After his prickly young protégée had nearly been killed six weeks ago at the hands of Grindelwald's recruiters, he had all but begged Bella to help him with the girl. Minerva had been questioned by some of Bella's fellow Aurors as part of the investigation and had passed with flying colors – she'd known nothing but the standard rumors about the recruitment ring until she'd stumbled upon its members meeting that night. But Albus was quite sure there was something else going on in her life, and equally sure that Bella could succeed in getting her to talk about it where he'd failed.

Before she could do that, though, she would have to figure out a pretext for getting Miss Minerva alone. Despite Albus' suggestion, she suspected the girl would not eagerly accept an invitation to tea, and she didn't seem like the type who would want to bond over an afternoon of clothes shopping and manicures either. But perhaps a request for help – ah, yes, that would not only be an excellent cover, but would put Minerva at ease by making her feel as if she had the upper hand. 

"What might I ask her to help me with?" Bella wondered aloud, removing the last cat – her lovely Persian, Snowy – from the green goo and beginning to wipe the excess from his fur with a spare towel. Considering Minerva's amazing performance in stopping the undercover recruitment at Hogwarts, she could almost have asked for her assistance with some of her real work. Too bad it was all so highly classified. 

She kept thinking while she cleared up the Flee mess and waved her wand to wake her pets from their naps. Eventually, she settled upon what she thought was the perfect solution. With the cats mewing and winding around her ankles, she sat at her desk, composed a letter and fired it off by owl within a quarter-hour.

_Now we shall see what we shall see,_ she thought. She let the cats out for their nightly prowl and went to bed feeling very pleased with her own ingenuity. She was even more pleased when she woke early the next morning to find Minerva's affirmative reply waiting for her.

They met in Hogsmeade that same night outside the confectioners' shop. Minerva returned Bella's welcoming embrace with more warmth than usual, and Bella nodded sagely to herself – asking for help, especially this kind of help, had been a good idea. 

"I'm glad you were able to meet me on such short notice," she said. "I've been meaning to do this for ages. Albus has such a sweet tooth, I know he'll be delighted."

"He's got more than _one_ sweet tooth," Minerva said fondly. "He was a dreadful hypocrite when I was younger, lecturing me about not eating properly at dinner and then going back to his office and stuffing himself with Chocolate Frogs. Of course, that meant I never had to look any further than his desk drawer for chocolate when I wanted it."

"Well, I'm very grateful for your assistance. I'm sure you'll do a much better job of choosing than I would. I just don't know what he likes these days," Bella lied. She gestured to the shop door. "Shall we?"

Inside, she watched Minerva picking over the bins and barrels of sweets, noting that the girl was still slightly favoring the arm she'd broken. She wondered if she should ask if it hurt, but decided not to. Sharp as Minerva was, she ought to know enough to go back to the infirmary if she were really in pain.

Of course, the workings of Minerva's mind were hardly predictable. Bella hadn't been around much when her own children were growing up – being an Auror wasn't a nine-to-five – but she clearly remembered that her daughter Louisa had, at Minerva's age, been as cheerful and flighty as a robin in springtime, with parties and new dresses and handsome young men occupying most of her thoughts. Bella herself, though always more practically minded, had still managed to have her share of fun at twenty, even under the dour Victorian regime of the day. That was what being twenty was for. There was more than enough time to be serious and sober later in life.

Minerva, on the other hand, appeared to be training for the world championships in seriousness and sobriety. If Louisa had been a robin, she was a raven, dark and wary and solemn. Only occasionally did a smile or a flash of wry humor break through her stern façade. 

The exception to that rule, Bella thought, was when the girl was looking at Albus. Then her whole face melted into an expression of soft, yearning affection that made Bella's heart ache for her. The look was tempered with equal parts of hopelessness and resignation, though, as if Minerva had weighed her chances of finding happiness in love and deemed them slim to none. 

As far as Bella was concerned, the jury was still out on that. Albus had firmly rejected any possibility of being more than a mentor to Minerva, and in light of the grim tale he'd told her about Minerva's parents' own May-December relationship, his vehemence on the subject was easy enough to understand. But she'd known her cousin for a very long time, since he'd been not a venerable and respected wizard, but a lanky ten-year-old trying to shoo her and her toy broomstick away from his Quidditch games. And she'd been with him when he'd gotten the owl from Dippet, had seen the stricken look on his face as he read that Minerva had been injured. She wondered if there might not be a hint of something there, something that he wouldn't even admit to himself – Of course, that was only her opinion. Far be it from her to question his motivations. He'd always been the noble one in the family, after all.

While she considered all this, Minerva passed over the Blood Pop bin with a faint grimace of disgust, tossed a couple of Jelly Slugs into the box she held, closed it and presented it to Bella.

"There you are," she said. "All his favorites, and a few new kinds for him to try." She leveled a cool blue gaze at Bella across the top of the box, as if she were daring the older woman to find fault with her choices. 

Bella, not to be intimidated, gazed back. If Albus wasn't interested in Minerva, she thought, it wasn't for lack of looks – the girl was really quite attractive, though in a dark, angular way that was not at all in accordance with the current craze for voluptuous blondes and redheads. Every feature in her pale, heart-shaped face was slightly pointed, from stubborn chin to narrow nose. Even her brows seemed to naturally grow in points, like Gothic arches, giving her an air of being skeptical about everything. She resembled her father very much – Bella could remember McGonagall senior scanning her Potions homework with that same what-sort-of-fool-do-you-take-me-for expression. It seemed Minerva's doomed young mother had left as slight a mark on her daughter's looks as she had on her life. She'd been little more than a vessel to carry her husband's rampaging Celtic genes into the next generation.

"Thank you," Bella said to the product of their union, who was still watching her and waiting to see what she would do next. She hefted the box appraisingly. "Gracious, there must be five pounds of sugar in here. He'll be fat as a Puffskein if he eats it all." The corners of Minerva's mouth curled up in a small smile at the image of a fat Dumbledore, and Bella grinned, thinking that this was going even better than she'd hoped. 

************************************************************

Minerva, for her part, had been surprised and a little suspicious when she'd received Bella's letter the previous evening. Bella struck her as a person who was used to handling things herself, and quite competently at that. It was difficult to picture her needing help with something as simple as assembling a care package of sweets. But the message had been friendly, and it was really all for Albus' sake, so she'd agreed. 

Thus far, she was enjoying the excursion more than she'd thought she would. She'd never spent any time alone with Bella – they'd always been two legs of an uncomfortable triangle. Now she discovered that the woman had her own version of the charm that every member of the Dumbledore family, even the certifiably mad Aberforth, seemed to possess in spades. Bella was complimentary without being insincere, interested without prying and funny enough that even Minerva had to smile at some of the things she said. When she suggested that the two of them visit her house so Minerva could meet her cats, Minerva only hesitated for a minute before saying "All right – why not?"

In appearance, the house was exactly what she expected Bella's home to be. It sat on a well-kept street behind a barrier of rosebushes, sporting brickwork and pointing neat enough to please the most straitlaced member of the Ladies' Club. On the inside, it was furnished with spindly-legged antiques that went perfectly with Bella's tasteful, well-dressed image. Conflicting wildly with all this, however, was the overpowering smell of cats. Cats, and something else. Minerva wrinkled up her nose, considered politely ignoring it, and finally decided that she had to ask.

"Is that … cabbage I smell?" she inquired.

"Why, yes," said Bella casually, as if everyone's house smelled like a cabbage-processing plant. "I just made a batch of cabbage juice this morning. It's wonderful for the kitties' digestion. You should try it."

"Um," said Minerva, concentrating on breathing through her mouth. 

Bella didn't appear to be bothered by the smell in the slightest. She called "Snowy! Tibbles! Tufty! Mr. Paws! Mama's home!" and was immediately swarmed by four pampered-looking balls of fur. 

"Look, dears," she said, "I've brought a guest. This is Minerva."

The cats all looked at the intruder, sizing her up. Minerva would normally have switched to her cat form so she could greet them properly, but Madam Valerian had forbidden her to transform until after the Christmas holidays. The nurse had been afraid too many changes in size and composition would disrupt the healing process that was still going on deep within her bones. 

Minerva was perfectly willing to comply with that directive for the moment. It was an excellent excuse for not doing as Dippet had requested and showing her transformation to Tom – who, to her dismay, had not only asked Dippet about it again, but had waited for her after a class one day and asked her himself. She'd simply told him she couldn't do it because of a medical problem, and he'd been forced to walk away to where his little group of sycophants was waiting for him. She was hoping that she would be able to get at him somehow, without transforming, before her reprieve ran out.

Since she was stuck in human form, she settled for greeting Bella's cats by saying "Pleased to meet you," as if they'd been a quartet of humans themselves, and holding out a hand to them. Each cat in turn sniffed, twitched its whiskers thoughtfully, then rubbed the side of its face across her knuckles and purred.

"They like you," Bella commented.

"They're lovely," Minerva said politely. "May I hold you?" she asked the Persian. It mewed in reply, and she scooped it up and held it in the crook of one arm, where it dangled like a giant fur rug. Bella observed this with approval.

"Let's have some tea," she said.

While Bella fussed over the tea things, Minerva stroked the Persian and inspected the framed photographs on the sitting-room walls. Unsurprisingly, most of them were either of cats on their own, or of Bella with various cats. 

_How many cats can one person own in a lifetime? _she mused. If you figured fifteen years per cat and an average of four cats at a time … and allowed for different start and finish times in ownership of each cat … Her head hurt just trying to figure it out. No matter how you looked at it, it all added up to one thing: a damned lot of cats.

Mixed in with the cat photos were some that contained only people. She saw a series showing a pair of children – presumably Bella's – growing from infancy to adulthood. There was one of a much younger Bella getting married to a rather pudgy, homely man. (_Ugh! Is that Mr. Figg? _wondered Minerva.) And there were quite a few of members of the Dumbledore family, including a tall auburn-haired boy with twinkling blue eyes.

Minerva smiled. She knew who _that_ was.

"Come on over," called Bella, and with a final look at the grinning, waving young Albus, she went to collect her cup and sit on the sofa in front of the fireplace.

Bella's tea was amazingly good, sweet and lemony with a slight kick that made it burn pleasantly on its way down and warm the insides when it reached its destination. By the time Minerva got to the bottom of her first cup, she was feeling very cozy and content. Even the cabbage aroma had stopped bothering her. She relaxed into the sofa and stared at the leaping flames in the fireplace while Bella poured her a refill.

************************************************************

They talked for a long time about nothing in particular, about the upcoming holidays and how cold the weather had been and how Minerva's teaching was coming along. Then Bella began to tell stories – funny, endearing ones – about her schooldays and the people she had known, with a few anecdotes centering on times she'd gotten in trouble with a certain crochety old Potions Master. And then the stories changed to earlier in Bella's childhood. Minerva listened raptly, sipping tea all the while, as Bella reminisced about herself tagging along after Albus, who was five years older than she. He'd been like an older brother to her, Bella said, making toys for her and entertaining her with the spells he was learning in school (there hadn't been any rules against underage magic back then). 

"But he always did worry about me so much," Bella said, levitating another log onto the fire with her wand and sending a shower of colored sparks up the chimney. "I can't count the number of times I told him to mind his own business and let me mind mine."

"Yes, he's still like that sometimes," said Minerva.

Bella looked down at the top of Minerva's head – she'd slid down to sit on the floor with her back against the sofa some time ago, and had all four cats sprawled purring across her lap and around her legs. Watching her smooth their fur dreamily, Bella thought that the girl was as mellow and open as she was going to get. Now was the time to make her move. With all the firelight and liquor-laced tea, she reflected, it was almost like a seduction, except that she wanted Minerva to talk to her, not go to bed with her.

"He only worries because he cares, you know," she said gently. "I think – I think he's rather worried about you at the moment."

"Oh? Why do you think that?" Minerva hadn't stopped stroking the cat in her lap, but Bella's practiced eye saw a little tension creep into her posture.

_Kid gloves, Arabella_, she reminded herself. _She's not a suspect you're interrogating._

"No reason in particular," she said. "He just mentioned that the two of you had been very close when you were younger, and I got the impression that you weren't so close now. And that it bothered him. He seemed concerned that something was troubling you – something you didn't want to tell him about. Is there?"

*************************************************************

It was testament to Bella's skills that these words barely disturbed the warm, muzzy glow Minerva was feeling. Instead, she found herself thinking, as if it were completely natural, that perhaps she should finally unburden herself to someone, and that perhaps Bella was the right someone. The older woman was so kind, so friendly. Minerva couldn't believe she'd ever been jealous or suspicious of her. Then, too, Bella worked for the Ministry – she was an Auror – it was her job to catch people who had done bad things. She had even more power than Albus when it came to that. And as a woman, she would know how Minerva felt about what had happened to her, would understand the embarrassment as well as the desire for justice. She would know how to help.

Bella, who seemed to realize that her companion needed a moment to think, had leaned past Minerva's shoulder, picked up her empty teacup and busied herself making a fresh pot to refill it. She was nearly finished when Minerva turned around, drawing a trembling breath to tell her that she was right, there was something troubling her, and caught Bella pouring a jolt of some liquid into her cup from a silver flask.

She froze. Was this why she felt so strange – so light-headed and languorous at the same time? Had Bella had been trying to get her drunk, or worse? Was she manipulating her somehow? Trying to trick her into saying something? 

The thought frightened her, but not only that. It infuriated her.

************************************************************

With all her years of experience, Bella was still surprised at the suddenness of Minerva's change in demeanor. She shot up from the floor like a jack-in-the-box, shedding protesting cats to both sides, and stood swaying a bit and staring accusingly at her hostess.

"You put something in my drink? What is this all about? What are you trying to do to me?"

"Minerva, it's just liquor," soothed Bella, "and just a bit at that. Couldn't you taste it all along? It's not going to hurt you. Neither am I. I only want to talk to you."

"I'm going home!" Minerva said wildly. "You – I can't believe – I'm going right now!"

"Wait." Bella caught hold of her arm. "I won't keep you if you truly want to leave, but you can't Apparate in this condition. You'll be splinched in an instant. I'll get you some Floo powder, and you can go." She went to the mantelpiece, fetched a small porcelain box and came back to her angry, reeling guest. "Don't say anything. Let me give the directions. And promise me you'll go straight to bed and try to calm down when you get back to the castle."

When Minerva had gone, Bella stared into the fireplace after her for a long time.

"I don't understand," she said to Tufty, who had come to sniff around her shoes. "What would make her react that way? It was something to do with her drink being doctored." With a flick of her wand, she repaired her broken china, then went to a mirror on the wall. 

"Albus," she said, and in a moment, her cousin's face appeared in the glass.

"How did it go?" he asked without bothering to greet her.

"Wonderfully, up to a point, and then terribly. She saw me making tea, the exact same way I've been serving it to you and everyone else for the last seventy years, and acted as if I were going to drug her and sell her into slavery. I've sent her back to Hogwarts. You might want to look in on her and see she's all right."

"I will," Dumbledore said.

"Good. And I think you should probably leave her alone about it for a while. We know she's not doing anything illegal, after all. Perhaps she'll work through it on her own."

"Is that your professional opinion?"

"That's my opinion as someone who's just nearly been blown away by Hurricane Minerva," Bella said.

"I've had a few run-ins with that storm myself," said Dumbledore. "Thank you for trying, Bella. Good night."

"Good night, Albus."

To be continued … 

Author's Note: You know, I've just noticed that practically everything I write has chocolate in it at some point or other. I suppose that shows you where my priorities lie. Anyway, I know this was another long chapter, so thanks for hanging in there if you made it this far, and thanks very much to everyone who reviewed the last one. =)

The next chapter will have much more Tom Riddle in it. If I stay on this roll I've been on for the last few days, it should be up by early next week.


	16. Pax Vobiscum

Okay, maybe there will be just *one* more chapter before we get back to Tom Riddle. Just one, though. I swear. (BTW, "pax vobiscum" means "peace be with you.")

Chapter 17: Pax Vobiscum

The following week was the start of Christmas holidays. Minerva spent most of it locked away in her room, nursing a huge case of hurt and bitterness. She'd been betrayed. All Bella's friendliness and hospitality had been no more than an act to get her to spill her guts about her personal problems. Worse, she'd been _compromised_, had had her judgment and self-control wrenched away by artificial means yet again. 

_If they ever hand out an award for Person Most Likely To Be Slipped A Mickey, I'm a dead cert to win_, she thought with a touch of grim humor.

As she generally did, she found relief in anger, which, in this case, she directed against Bella. She had an unhappy feeling that this wasn't quite fair – now that she was thinking about it with a clear head, she could see that Dumbledore had probably asked his cousin to talk to her – but she didn't want to be angry with him if she could help it, and Bella was a convenient scapegoat. She'd received a couple of messages from Bella by owl, apologizing for any misunderstanding and asking if they could meet again. So far she had ignored them, though not without guilt. 

Dumbledore had said nothing about any of it to her. He didn't have to. On the few occasions she'd ventured out to go to a meal or fetch something from their shared office, his distressed looks had spoken for him. 

Minerva had never realized another person's concern could be such a burden. It left her feeling sad and guilty for making him worry about her. It also drove her mad with resentment. Shouldn't he have a little more faith in her ability to handle her own affairs by now? After all, she'd managed to face down a gang of spies and traitors, even if she'd nearly ended up dead in the process. If that didn't inspire confidence, what would? Would he still be treating her like a child when she was as old as he was? 

_Stop acting like a child, and he'll stop treating you like one, _piped up the ever-helpful part of her mind that specialized in unpleasant truths. _You've been sulking about all week, and all because he committed the awful crime of trying to find out what's on your mind. And don't say he could have asked you himself, because he did, more than once, and you wouldn't tell him._

"Quiet, you!" she snapped, and turned red when she realized she'd said it aloud. Only a few days without companionship, and already she was reverting to her old habit of talking to herself. She'd done it often when she was a child – she'd had no one to play with, and her father had spent the greater part of most days stirring vile concoctions in the basement, where she'd been forbidden to go. After he'd died, she'd talked to herself constantly, out of necessity. The house would have been silent as a grave itself if she hadn't.

_You don't want to go back to that. Talk to Albus. It'll make both of you feel better. There's no need to spill any secrets, just reassure him that you're all right. You know what it is to be isolated when you've no choice in the matter; why isolate yourself when you do?_

Maybe, Minerva thought, she should just go to bed. The clock only said seven p.m., but the sooner she was asleep, the sooner she could stop dwelling on these things for a while. She yanked the pins from her hair – it was ridiculous to wear it up while she was in here anyway, as if anyone was going to see her! – and started brushing it out in preparation. It was getting very long. Nearly waist-length now. No wonder her neck hurt all the time, with so much weight coiled up at the back of her head.

Just as she finished the brushing, she heard a knock and called "What?"

"Minerva, it's me." It was Dumbledore's voice, a bit muffled through the thick oaken slab of the door. With brush still in hand, she opened it to find him standing in the hallway, looking very fancy in a set of bottle-green dress robes. 

_Here's your chance to say something to him. For heaven's sake, do try to make it something nice._

"Going to a party?" she asked.

"A concert," he said. "The choir at St. Paul's is putting on a performance of St.-Saens' Christmas Oratorio. Hagrid and I had planned to attend, and I wondered if you would care to come along."

"Hagrid? Is he a closet classical-music fan?"

"It was my idea," said Dumbledore. "I thought it would be good for him to go. His cultural horizons could use a bit of broadening."

She looked at him in confusion. A week of awkwardness and not speaking to each other, and suddenly he was asking her to go to a concert as if nothing had happened? What was he trying to do? 

Suddenly, she was embarrassed at her own suspiciousness. All the plotting and sneaking she'd done lately had poisoned her mind when it came to other people's motives. Maybe he just wanted the pleasure of her company. Maybe he was trying to patch things up between them. That shouldn't be so difficult to believe. 

"Oh – well – all right, then, I'm sure it'll be lovely," she said. "Just give me a minute to change clothes." Hurriedly, she went back into the room and threw on her own dress robes, which were also green – dark emerald taffeta with jet trim. She supposed she ought to get some new ones – she'd bought these to wear to an awards dinner in her sixth year, and they were already out of style. They served their purpose, though. It wasn't as if she had occasion to dress up very often. Smoothing down her skirt and straightening her cuffs, she went to join Dumbledore and Hagrid in the hall.

Hagrid was too young to Apparate, and wouldn't have been allowed to in any case, so they had to take a rather circuitous route to their destination. It made them late, and the prelude had already started as they slipped into the very last row of the packed cathedral, Dumbledore murmuring a concealing spell to help keep the Muggle congregation from noticing them. Christianity was very clear on its anti-magic stance; none of the people here were likely to appreciate the presence of three wizards – music lovers or not – in their house of worship. Contrary to popular Muggle legends that had them erecting black altars to demons from the deeps, most members of the wizarding community were agnostics, though they did tend to invoke the names of various gods when under stress. Now, however, was not the time to start trying to explain that to an outraged mob.

Once seated, Dumbledore immediately settled back, folded his hands into his robe sleeves and closed his eyes to better enjoy the performance. Anyone would have thought he was asleep, if not for the rhythmic tapping of his booted foot on the floor. 

Hagrid, for his part, had looked like he was anticipating an evening of torturous boredom all the way from Hogwarts, but was transfixed by the music now that he was actually here. Unfortunately, all the words were in Latin, which was a mystery to him beyond the bit he knew from the spells he had learned during his abortive career as a student. Every minute or two, he leaned down to stage-whisper "What're they singin' abou' now?" into Minerva's ear. His voice had changed over the last year, descending to bass tones so deep that the pew vibrated slightly each time he spoke. The Muggles sitting closest to them kept looking around, sure they'd heard or felt something, but perplexed at their inability to locate it.

At last Minerva hissed "Hagrid – sshhh! I'll tell you all about it later, I promise. Just listen." He obeyed, and she leaned back against the pew, wincing a little and cradling her left arm with her right. It was healing much more slowly than any of her other injuries had – it still ached when she was cold or tired, and she was both at the moment. All she wanted was to lie down in some dark, warm, quiet place and rest till it felt better. Instead, here she was, sitting on a hard wooden bench with a frigid draft from the rear doors of the cathedral blowing across her. She was beginning to wish she hadn't come. She was just worn out.

That, she realized as the choir moved into a recitative section of the piece, was her problem in general these days: fatigue. Physical fatigue from late nights and hours of prowling around the halls. Mental fatigue from puzzling over Tom's actions and looking for new avenues of investigation while simultaneously trying to fulfill her duties to her students. Emotional fatigue from keeping the whole problem to herself. For the first time, she seriously considered letting it all go – just leaving the past in the past and trying to move ahead with her life. That was what Hagrid had advised her to do. The strategy seemed to have worked for him. 

She peeked sidelong at his face, incongruous in its combination of size and smooth youthfulness. He'd been publicly humiliated, disgraced, had his entire future ripped away, but had still managed to carry on, even to be happy. 

And she – her life had been altered, and not for the better, but what had she really lost? 

What Tom had done was a terrible thing, but it was ultimately a _small_ thing. He might have touched her, but he couldn't take anything away from her. Not unless she let him. She'd been dreaming of justice all these months, but there would be no justice if she lost herself in the process of winning it.

"_Et in terra pax," _sang the choir. Peace on earth. That was a fine ambition, thought Minerva, but a lofty one. She'd settle for inner peace. __

She stole another glance, this time in the other direction, toward Dumbledore. As if he could feel her gaze on him, he opened his eyes for a moment and smiled at her with all the old, uncomplicated affection she remembered from a few years ago, when she was his student and he was her teacher and there were no secrets or misunderstandings between them. The tenderness of that expression solidified her decision.

_I'm going to be different, _she promised him silently. _I'm going to try to forget. And then – then maybe you and I can go back to the way things were._

Dumbledore looked down at the arm she was still protecting. A shadow of worry passed briefly across his face again.

"It hurts?" he asked. She thought of denying it, but then admitted "A little."

Putting down the program he'd been holding, he reached over, straightened her arm carefully and wrapped both his hands around it, one at the wrist and one just below the elbow, where the breaks had been. If you looked closely, you could still see the faint traces of scars that the jagged edges of her bones had left when they tore through the skin. Those would disappear soon, or so Madam Valerian had told her. The residual discomfort would take longer. There was only so much that magic could do. Madam Valerian had offered to give her a potion to help, but Minerva had refused – unpleasant as the pain was, her distaste for being drugged was worse.

Dumbledore whispered a spell under his breath, and gentle but intense warmth began to radiate from his body to hers. She let out a slow sigh as the ache ebbed and vanished – she hadn't realized how bad it had been until it had gone. He watched her face intently until he saw her relax, then laid her arm across her lap and covered her hand with one of his.

"Peace be with you, Minerva," he said softly, so no one but she could hear him.

"And with you," she replied.

And for the moment, it was.

To be continued …


	17. New Leaves

**Disclaimer**: The usual.

**Chapter 18:** New Leaves

_Crash!_

Lightening had forked across the storm-darkened sky only an instant before the thunder came along. Almost immediately, it flickered again, and everyone in the fifth-year Transfiguration class stopped what they were doing to watch – at least, as well as they could watch through the rain that sheeted down the window glass. According to the calendar, today was the first day of spring. The weather had other ideas.

"_Excuse_ me," said Minerva from the front of her classroom. "I'm sure you've all seen rain before, so if you don't mind, I have a lesson to teach." She looked pointedly at the big grandfather clock in the corner, and slowly, the students dragged their attention back to her.

"Very well then. As there's more water outside today than anyone could possibly need, we're going to put some of it to good use by learning how to turn water into another liquid. Not any sort of alcoholic beverage, Mr. Maher," she said, before the skinny, freckled boy in the last row could say anything. All the other Gryffindors snickered. They knew about the parties Maher hosted in his dormitory on Saturday nights. So did Minerva, who had broken up a number of them when she was a prefect and Maher was a precocious third year. 

Deciding that she might as well forestall all the inappropriate suggestions at once, she went on: "Not anything flammable or poisonous either. And definitely _not_ any bodily fluid."

"What, then?" asked Maher, looking into the silver bowl of rainwater on his desk.

"Milk," said Minerva firmly, and ignored the groans of "_Milk_ – ugh" and "Can't we at least make it cocoa – it's so cold in here –"that sprang up throughout the room. She showed them the proper way to perform the transfiguration, took a quick tour of the tables to make sure that no one was messing around, then sat down and watched them go to it.

If there was one benefit to having given up spying, she reflected (noting at the same time that the group nearest the windows had already finished and probably deserved a reward for their success) it was having more energy for her teaching. She'd slept so little at night for the last year and a half that she'd always wanted to put her head down on her desk and pass out by this point in the afternoon. Now that she was alert again, keeping proper order was much easier, as was thinking of creative classroom activities. For instance, incorporating the rain into the day's lesson.

Still, it was proving terribly difficult to abandon the purpose that had consumed her for so long. Heaven knew she'd tried. Beginning the very day after the Christmas concert, she'd ceased her patrols of the hallways, opting instead to retire early with a book, or to join Dumbledore for his traditional bedtime snack of toast with almond butter. ("Full of wonderful, natural sleep-promoting substances," he always proclaimed, as if he were advertising it on the WWN.) In the area of food, she'd also made a valiant effort to concentrate on eating rather than watching Tom during meals. She'd actually put on a few pounds from that, which was good – for the first time in ages, she could stand up without getting dizzy and sit down without feeling her bones grinding against the chair.

But giving up the hunt altogether – ah, that was another story. Because Tom was still there, right under her nose, whether she looked for him or not. And no matter how firm her resolve, she found herself following him with her eyes wherever he went, looking for something, for anything …

"Miss McGonagall!" someone wailed from a table near the window. "Smith is turning our milk all sour on purpose, and it's full of lumps!"

"Mr. Smith, turn it fresh again unless you'd like to drink it that way," Minerva called. Smith waved his wand over the bowl with alacrity.

Yes, teaching was definitely getting easier. Surely closing off the past would too. Time would take Tom and everything he represented far away, and she would never see him again. Until then, she had work to do. 

Picking up a cup from her desk, she wandered around the room again, sampling a little milk from everyone's bowl to see how their efforts had come out and awarding and subtracting points – ten to the group by the window for finishing first, five to another group for putting a delicate touch of strawberry essence in their product, five away from freckle-faced Maher's group for leaving theirs so watery that it tasted as if they'd used it to wash a dirty milk glass. She had to remind herself not to lick her lips after each sip. Along with a taste for fish and a nearly uncontrollable desire to loll around in warm, sunny spots, her experience as a cat had given her a whole new appreciation for milk. Dumbledore, who sat next to her at breakfast every morning, had learned to put the stone milk jug far out of her reach if he wanted to save any for himself.

When the bell signaling the end of class rang, Minerva sent the chattering Gryffindors on their way and banished their leftover projects to the kitchen to be cleaned up by the house-elves. Then she gathered up her things and left, locking the door carefully behind her. She'd meant to go down and see Hagrid after class – Sugar hadn't been well lately, and Hagrid, who had a way with animals of all sorts, had offered to look him over for her – but the rain showed no signs of lessening, and she didn't care to get drenched on the way there. It wouldn't do Sugar any good either. Maybe she'd go back to her room and sit by the fireplace for a while. The students were right; the castle got awfully cold and drafty on days like this.

She was walking slowly through the halls, not thinking of much except whether to have cocoa or hot apple cider once in front of the fire, when someone laid a hand on her shoulder from behind. She nearly swore in surprise, but choked the expletive back and turned to look at the person who had stopped her.

"You're to come with me, Miss McGonagall," Tom said.

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Her first impulse was to duck out from under the hand that still rested on her, and she obeyed it, not caring if she looked rude or not. Though she'd lost the instinctive, visceral fear of him some time ago, suddenly coming face to face with him, and worse, being touched by him, was enough to send cold shock crashing into her like a wave of ice water.

_Stop it, Minerva, stop it RIGHT NOW_. Drawing herself up, she demanded "What do you mean, creeping up on me that way? And where am I supposed to be going with you?"

"There's a meeting in the Headmaster's office," said Tom. "He sent me to fetch you." His dark eyes rested on her dispassionately, as if Dippet had asked him to collect a book or a pair of spectacles, and now he'd found them.

"And this meeting is about …?"

"I really couldn't say. But Professor Dumbledore and a woman from the Ministry are there too, and a few other people. They're waiting for us now. Come along."

Walk with him through the halls? She'd rather go for a stroll in the Forbidden Forest with Hagrid's giant spider.

"You go ahead," she said. "I – I have to take these to my room." With a dip of her head, she indicated the pile of books and papers she still held. "Tell the Headmaster I'll be there as soon as I can."

Tom stood looking at her a moment longer. Somehow, with his perfectly pressed black robes and shiny badge, he managed to make her feel intimidated, as if she were a first-year student in trouble with the Head Boy. She was furious at herself for feeling that way – she was not only his senior, but, as a teacher, his superior – but she couldn't help it. To cover her discomfort, she spoke as coldly as she could.

"I gave you an instruction," she said. "Go and take my message before I give you detention to go with it."

He didn't look worried by her threat, but he did as she said. Of course he would. He was known for abiding by rules, for always doing what was proper. It was a well-polished act, and he wasn't about to let it slip over a ten-minute delay in delivering her to a meeting.

"I'll tell the Headmaster," he said. With that, he turned and walked away down the hall, moving quickly without seeming to hurry. Minerva only watched him go for a second before heading off to do what she'd said she would. Teacher or not, he was right – she couldn't keep the Headmaster waiting for long. At least in an assembly of that sort, which sounded like it contained Bella as well as Albus, her safety was assured.

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When she slipped through the door to Dippet's office, Bella was indeed there, sleek and elegant in Muggle clothing again, with a faint nod and smile to acknowledge their acquaintance. As part of her new philosophy, Minerva had swallowed her pride and invited Bella to meet her at the Three Broomsticks several weeks before so she could make amends for her behavior regarding the spiked-tea incident. The older woman had accepted her apology gracefully, and given her an affectionate hug when they parted. Now, however, she was all business, every inch the Auror.

Dumbledore, sitting next to his cousin, smiled at Minerva with more warmth, but made no move toward her. On his right, Charlotte Borgin, a brown-haired, dark-skinned Ravenclaw who was this year's Head Girl, was talking quietly to Tom, and did not look up to see who had come in. The other two people in the room – both middle-aged men – were unfamiliar, but looked like officials of some sort.

"Ah, Minerva," said Dippet in his cracked and trembling voice. "I'm glad you could join us. Please, sit down." He pointed to the only unoccupied seat in the room. As luck (or not) would have it, that happened to be a spot on the sofa with Tom and Charlotte. Minerva sat in it, as near to the sofa arm and as far away from Tom as she could, gathering her robes around her so they wouldn't brush against his. Despite these measures, she was still close enough to Tom to feel the heat coming from his body. It left a sick, feverish sensation on her skin.

Now Dippet sat down as well, looking dwarfed by the massive Headmaster's desk.

"You must be wondering why you are here," he said to Minerva. She nodded. "Well, I'm sure the answer will come as no surprise to you, especially considering your – adventure last fall."

_Grindelwald_, thought Minerva. _This has something to do with him._

Dippet confirmed it immediately. "As you know all too well, the dark wizard Grindelwald had sent recruiters here to try to sway some of our students to his cause. After you found them in the tower, the recruitment stopped for a time. Now, though, we have cause to think it may have started again. I have discussed the matter with representatives from the Ministry of Magic," indicating Bella, "and with some of the Hogwarts regents." Here he gestured toward the two strangers in their conservative robes. "We have decided that as they must be meeting covertly, covert measures of our own may be the best way to uncover them."

At this point, Bella spoke up. "Until now, we've had a bit of an informal operation going on. The senior professors have been keeping an ear out in classes for any information regarding Grindelwald and his activities, and the Head Boy and Girl have been doing the same in the student areas. We felt this would arouse very little suspicion, since they have every right and reason to be there. But we've gotten only rumors – nothing we can use to make arrests – and so we must take our activities to the next level."

"And since we're lucky enough to have an Animagus at our disposal, so to speak," said Dippet, "we thought you would be the ideal candidate to assist us."

"What is it exactly you want me to do?" asked Minerva, remembering the night she'd gone to the West Tower and hoping this assignment would be a little less perilous.

"Only listen, my dear," said Dumbledore. Out of the corner of her eye, Minerva thought she saw a flicker of some emotion cross Tom's face at this, but it was gone before she could identify it. "If you agree, we will arrange for you to spend some time each night in the common rooms of all four Houses in turn, in your Animagus form. People are likely to speak freely in front of you – why would anyone try to conceal their activities from a cat? You will gather whatever information you can and report directly back to Bella, Headmaster Dippet or myself."

"Will you do it?" asked Dippet. 

Minerva glanced around the room. Clearly, Dippet, Dumbledore and Bella all expected her to say yes. So did the regents. Charlotte looked curious, and Tom looked – he looked –

_He looks eager. Why? Why would he want me to do this?_

The thought of doing anything Tom wanted her to do rankled, but she couldn't disappoint Dumbledore and Bella. And she did genuinely want to help.

"Certainly," she said, and Dippet relaxed for the first time since the meeting had begun.

"Wonderful!" he said. "That's wonderful news. I'm very glad you agree with us. Now, there's just one thing – our regents have never seen you transform, and Charlotte and Tom will need to know what you look like as a cat so they can help you get in and out of the common rooms, and so they'll know when you're there. Would you mind very much just giving a quick demonstration?"

_Oh, Gods above. Now I am well and truly stuck_, thought Minerva unhappily. She still didn't want Tom to see her Animagus form, but here in front of all these witnesses, she couldn't argue.

Standing up, she took a step toward the center of the room and changed before she had too much more time to get nervous about it. Both men from the Ministry let out admiring gasps and applauded lightly. At the same time, Charlotte said "Oh!"" in surprise. 

Minerva padded around in a circle, showing them that she really was a cat, carefully avoiding meeting Tom's eyes for fear of what she would see there. Finally, though, she could bear it no more. She looked.

He was smiling.

_To be continued …_

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Author's Notes

You've all left so many good questions and comments lately that I'm going to address some of them here!

Whisper: Thanks for the compliment! I wish I could post more often too. When I'm just writing one-off stories I'm pretty fast, but for a story like this, where I actually have to keep track of things and see that they make sense, I'm as slow as molasses. =) I have a couple of scenarios in mind for possible Dumbledore/McGonagall romance. Neither of them fit into the time frame covered in this story, though. I don't think Albus would ever permit romance to develop at this point – he still sees Minerva as mostly a child, even though she's several years over legal age, and would probably be disgusted with himself for feeling so much as a flicker of unchaste interest in her. But he is capable of less-than-saintly emotions, even if he doesn't act on them. 

I'm still not sure if I'm going to go the romance route. I love romance, but I love unrequited longing even more. We shall see! I never was a Dumbledore/McGonagall shipper until I started writing this story, but it's creeping up on me. I can't decide if I prefer them as potential romantic partners, or simply as the best of friends.

Strange One: You must've been reading my mind. Minerva just couldn't forget the Tom issue completely. =) I hope you enjoyed seeing him in this chapter. He will continue to appear, sometimes even more than this, throughout the rest of the story – which, I think, is finally drawing to a close.

Ozma: Yes; I think Hagrid is a very strong person, and not only in the physical sense. It must have been sheer hell for him to stay at Hogwarts after being expelled, but he managed it with dignity. And he has a pretty sharp mind for all his rough ways. He's always providing Harry and Co. with common-sense advice and insights into the people around them. (I saw him as Minerva's endearing, exasperating "younger brother" right from the scene with the two of them and Dumbledore at the beginning of SS/PS, but especially after the Three Broomsticks scene in PoA. "Hagrid, did you tell the whole pub?" was so much like something I'd say to my own brother!)

Lady of Arundel: I promise "Fidelius" will come eventually! And I have an idea for at least one other story in this series as well. Actually, I could bore you all to death with this arc forever (but I promise I won't). I have an embarrassing amount of backstory about Dumbledore and Bella and Minerva's parents and so forth. Clearly an unhealthy obsession on my part. 

Ryven: I'm so glad you like Arabella – I had lots of fun making up a persona for her, since almost nothing is known about her from the books. It'll be interesting to see what she's really like, when JKR finally gets on the ball and finishes Book Five. Regarding angst, I'm honored that this is the first angst story you've wanted to stick with. I try to leaven my angst with a few lighter scenes. so it doesn't get too oppressive. I love the genre as much as anyone, but 18 chapters of unrelieved brooding and weeping would depress even me. =)

Again, massive thanks to all reviewers: MK, Face of Evil, Minerva aka Sasha, Trance, Crydwyn, Mayfair, Veruka and anyone else I may have forgotten. (BTW, I'm going to try to start responding to reviews regularly within the story. I've noticed that a lot of other authors do that, and it does seem like a good way to communicate.)


	18. Lions' Den

**Disclaimer**: The usual.

**Chapter 19**: Lion's Den

Minerva lay sprawled out in front of the Gryffindor common-room fire, purring softly. To the casual eye, she appeared to be half asleep, just a cat lazing the night away. No one noticed that her ears pricked up attentively every time someone spoke.

The two other cats who were sharing the hearthrug with her knew she wasn't really one of them, but they'd agreed to let her stay on the condition that she would yield the best positions to them. That was fine with Minerva. Lounging here in the heat and flickering light was soporific enough anyway – she didn't want to actually fall asleep, only to look as if she had.

She rolled over, stretched herself luxuriously, and curled up nose-to-tail, facing out into the room with her eyes open in slits so she could look around. It was past midnight, and only a few people were still sitting in the squashy armchairs and sofas, playing wizard chess or studying or just talking quietly. The latter two, a seventh-year boy and girl on a love seat in the corner, were the ones she was interested in.

"I don't mean I agree with everything he's done," the girl was saying, "but you have to admit, some of his points are valid. What he says about Mudbloods taking property and positions that should go to real wizards …"

"Muggle-borns _are_ real wizards, Celestina," replied the boy impatiently. 

The girl sniffed.

"That's a matter of opinion," she said.

_It certainly is, Celestina_, thought Minerva from her position by the fire. _And your opinion is going to get you in a world of trouble if you don't watch out._ She made a mental note to add Celestina to her list. It hurt her to think of a Gryffindor supporting anyone so cruel and unjust as Grindelwald, but if that was the way Celestina felt, then the girl had better be prepared to answer for it.

Celestina's friend, apparently having heard enough of her rhetoric, now said good night and left for bed. Over the next quarter-hour, so did everyone else in the room. When the last person had gone up the stairs, Minerva got to her feet and stretched again, front legs first and then back, then lowered her head to give her two feline companions a friendly cheek-rub of thanks and farewell. The sound of their contented purring followed her as she flicked back to human form and let herself out the door.

Once in the hall, she hesitated for a moment, wondering whether she should go report to Dumbledore now or wait until morning. She checked her watch. It was nearly one a.m. now, but he often stayed up this late anyway – old men didn't need much sleep, he said, which was a laugh. He was the farthest thing from an old man Minerva could imagine. 

Thinking of him made her want to see him, if only for a few minutes, and she transformed again and trotted off toward his apartments. He'd installed an invisible cat-flap in the door so she could get in without having to change shape. That was how she entered, crouching and springing through the tiny opening in one motion, just because she could. 

Dumbledore was marking practice N.E.W.T. exams at his desk, with his glasses all the way down at the tip of his nose and a frown of concentration creasing his forehead. He didn't even blink as she came in.

_He doesn't know I'm here_, thought Minerva. That thought was followed by a wicked one. _Why not have a little fun with him?_ Instantly, she dropped into a stalking position and slunk across his faded red-and-gold Oriental rug, her eyes calculating the space between the bottom of his desk and the floor. 

When she'd almost reached the halfway point, he coughed and shifted in his chair, and she froze with one paw off the ground. _Damn!_

But Dumbledore didn't look up. He fumbled in the bowl next to his inkwell, picked a peppermint out of the assortment by touch, popped it into his mouth and went straight back to his work. 

Minerva resumed her progress. She was almost there … almost … she was under the edge of the desk … 

"Hello, Minerva," Dumbledore said calmly as she leapt into his lap and put her front paws on his shoulders. "How did it go tonight?"

She changed back to human form, disgruntled that her attempt at surprise had failed. That left her sitting across his knees with her arms round his neck. Embarrassed and a little red in the face, she got to her feet.

"I didn't think you saw me," she said.

"I knew you didn't," Dumbledore replied with a small smile.

_What does he mean by that?_ Minerva wondered. Since she didn't know, she launched into her report. He listened attentively and scrawled notes on a spare scrap of parchment while she talked.

"Are your student helpers working out well?" he asked. In addition to Charlotte Borgin and Tom, he'd recruited two seventh-year prefects to assist her in the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff common rooms – those doors were designed to protect the students, and so had no openings, not even cat-size ones. She needed someone to let her in, and sometimes to let her out as well.

"Yes." Relying on Tom for help was not pleasant, but he'd discharged his duty with the same cool efficiency he exhibited in everything he did. At no time had he behaved improperly toward her or tried to touch her, even when she was a cat. 

"And you are being careful?"

"Yes," she said again. Directly after their meeting in Dippet's office, Dumbledore had pulled her aside and told her in no uncertain terms that she was forbidden to risk her safety the way she had in the West Tower. If she saw or heard of any sort of meeting or other illicit activity, she was to come and get him immediately, and if he was away, as he still was from time to time, she was to go to Dippet.

"No heroics, Minerva," he'd said, looking at her sternly over his glasses. "Believe me, I understand those Gryffindor tendencies of yours – I have them myself – but being a live Gryffindor is greatly preferable to being a dead one, if you can help it. Promise."

She'd promised, though at the time she'd wondered if she would be able to keep that promise in the heat of a volatile situation. Fortunately, she hadn't been put to the test.

"I'm very glad to hear it," Dumbledore said now. "Which House is next on your schedule?"

"Slytherin, tomorrow. In the afternoon this time – it's a Hogsmeade day, and you know some of the older students stay behind. They might talk while the others are away."

"Ah, a beautiful spring Saturday afternoon in the dungeon," said Dumbledore. "Not my idea of a wonderful time, but when duty calls, what can we do but answer?"

Minerva smiled at that. "I don't mind," she said. "I've actually been enjoying this assignment." She had. Her independent spying efforts had always made her feel a little uneasy, as if she were doing something not quite honorable, even though she'd known she had good reason. Spying on behalf of the Ministry and Hogwarts, on the other hand, was deeply fulfilling. Now she was part of an effort larger than herself and her own grievances. It helped, too, that her activities weren't entirely secret – she had the support and guidance of people she trusted. And though she didn't like to admit it, there was a component of pride, too. It felt good to be consulted by Dumbledore and Bella, to be treated as a capable adult and their equal instead of an overgrown student. Overall, she was happier now than she had been at any time since the week of her graduation.

"You've done wonderfully well at it," said Dumbledore. "One would almost think you had prior experience." She looked at him quickly, wondering if he was trying to hint at something, but his expression held only approval.

"Thanks," she said, blushing a little.

"Speaking of that," he said casually, "Bella told me that she had talked to you about your abilities, and how you might use them in a more … official capacity."

"Oh. Yes." Minerva felt her blush heat up a notch. Bella had visited her a few days earlier to collect a report, and before she left, had suggested very seriously that Minerva should consider applying for a position with the Ministry at the end of the school term. Minerva had been both flattered and flustered, and had told Bella she would consider it. Working for the Ministry would mean giving up teaching, and she wasn't sure she was prepared to do that. 

"And have you given it any thought?"

"A little," Minerva said, which was a complete lie – she'd thought about it in nearly every free moment. "Do you think I should apply?"

"It isn't my decision to make," said Dumbledore. "You have the potential to be an excellent teacher. Your students have already learned a great deal from you. Is teaching rewarding for you, though? Is it what you want to do with the rest of your life?"

She studied his face, wondering what he wanted her to say. The truth was, she didn't know. She enjoyed her classes and loved seeing the delight on her students' faces when they finally grasped a new concept or learned to perform a difficult transfiguration. But there were plenty of frustrating moments in the job as well. 

"I haven't decided," she said finally.

"That's quite all right," Dumbledore replied. To her relief, he didn't look disappointed, only curious to see what she would choose. A small, selfish part of her wished he had said _Don't leave, Minerva; stay here with me_, but she ignored it and reached across the desk to give his hand an affectionate squeeze.

He squeezed back, then glanced over at his clock and said "Good Lord, it's nearly two in the morning. You'll be in no condition to do anything tomorrow if you don't get off to bed. Shall I walk you to your room?"

"No need for that," she said. "I'd just be keeping you from your own rest. I'll see you at breakfast. Goodnight."

"Goodnight to you," he said. "And Minerva – before you go, I want you to know that whatever path you take, I will support your decision. I told you once that we would always be friends. I meant it."

"Thanks," she said again, softly, and went away smiling to herself.

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Author's Notes:

Lisa: Hi! Good to hear from you again! Another update will be coming very soon.

Mayfair: Wow, I felt all warm and fuzzy when I read your comments. =) You're right, relationships between women can be very difficult to depict. (I'm lucky enough to have an older female friend/mentor myself, and I think that helps me in writing those relationships.) 

Whisper: You'll definitely see Albus' side of things, if not in this story, then the next one. I couldn't bring myself to make poor Minerva do _all_ the agonizing, now could I?

Face Of Evil: That was a cool quote about circumstance!

The Strange One: More evil Riddle coming your way in the next two chapters. And I do mean evil.

MK: Thanks! You are a great reviewer. =)

Bibphile: Glad you liked it! And I'm glad to hear you like the cat-behavior parts. I always worry that I'm going overboard with those, but they're so much fun I can't help putting them in.

Ezra: I try really, really hard to keep things in good taste, so it's very reassuring to hear I'm succeeding. (I've cut a couple of parts out of this story because I thought they were over the line.) I agree with you on the age-difference thing – it means less as both halves of a couple get older. But Minerva at twenty is just too young for Albus no matter how you look at it. And, too, I think being in a serious relationship with a much older man would keep a very young woman from developing completely as an individual. Later in life, with more experience and a stronger sense of self – then, it would be no problem.

Bishoujo Fairy: Thanks! Tom is probably always planning something evil, so it's a good bet that he is now as well.

Ozma: I think it's possible to Transfigure anything that has physical substance. (Maybe even a ghost; it has at least a little ectoplasm to work with. Hmmm, there's an idea for later …) Things that are similar in shape and size would be easiest, thus the choice of matchsticks-to-needles for that very first lesson everyone gets. But someone who was very skilled could probably Transfigure almost anything into anything!

Marauder-girl: Glad you like it! I love spy stuff too. Probably because I'd be a spy myself if I weren't such a big chicken. (I never would have made it into Gryffindor.)

Thanks so much to all of you for reviewing. The next chapter will be ready much sooner than this one was, thank heavens.


	19. Snakes' Lair

**Disclaimer**: The usual

**Chapter 20**: Snake's Lair

Dumbledore's prediction had been correct. The next afternoon was beautiful indeed, the sort of sunny, not-too-warm late May day that was just right for relaxing under a tree or walking around the lake. Most of the students who hadn't gone to Hogsmeade had decided to do something along those lines, forcing Minerva to weave her way through dozens of pairs of feet going in the opposite direction as she headed toward her appointment.

Tom was waiting for her at the top of the dungeon stairs, sitting on the uppermost step with his back against the wall and his head bent over a book. He ignored her as she walked past, but after a moment, he closed his book, got up and strolled nonchalantly in the direction of the hidden door. When he entered, she followed on at his heels.

Inside, the Slytherins' domain was sunk deep in a windowless gloom relieved only by the dim, greenish light of the hanging lamps. All the seats were upholstered in green velvet. Even the fire burned faintly green. The whole place had the look of an underground aquarium. 

_Except it's not fish who live here_, thought Minerva, _it's snakes_. 

All the snakes seemed to have slithered out for the day, though. The room was deserted. What was she to listen to if no one was here to talk?

Tossing the book he still held onto a low table (it was _Advanced History Of Magic_, Minerva saw), Tom knelt down in front of her. Something about the sight of his face looming above hers, handsome and clean-cut as an illustration on an RAF recruitment poster, sent an odd sensation crawling over her – a little more than déjà vu, definitely less than full-fledged recollection. She tried to catch it, to fix it in her mind so she could examine it more closely, but it slipped away like water through sand.

"I'm sure some people will be along soon," Tom said. "Perhaps you'd like to wait? I'll wait with you."

Minerva blinked. For a moment, she'd thought he'd said "I'll walk with you." That not-quite-memory feeling nibbled around the edges of her awareness again. She shook her head slightly in negation.

"No to which?" asked Tom, with the ghost of a smile. "Do you want to wait?" Minerva nodded with some difficulty, as a cat's neck muscles weren't designed for that motion. "Do you want me to wait with you?" After a brief hesitation, she shook her head no again, and Tom chuckled.

"Oh, now, I'm not such bad company, you know. Remember when we were prefects together? We could talk about old times … No? You're sure? Well, as you wish. Make yourself at home, and I'll be back in half an hour to see if anyone's come by. If not, I suppose we'll both be free for the afternoon." He straightened up easily, collected his book again and left. The door slid closed behind him with a grating of stone on stone and a very final-sounding thud.

Had Minerva been in human form, she would have shuddered at the crypt-door quality of that noise. Fortunately, her feelings were slightly blunted when she was a cat, and so she was able to soothe her nerves by simply reminding herself that she wasn't trapped. She could let herself out at any time if she felt like it, since no one was around. In the meantime, she might as well get comfortable. She hopped into a chair she had marked out as the best in the room on previous visits here, and waited. 

For a while, she busied herself with inspecting the life-size portrait of Salazar Slytherin that hung over the green marble fireplace. Slytherin stared back at her haughtily. He had a swarthy complexion and longish black hair tied into a neat queue. On his left middle finger was a silver ring – a coiled snake, of course – which he tapped rhythmically against the hilt of his sword. 

"Look somewhere else, cat," he snapped at last. Minerva obliged, slipping down from the chair to nose at some of the belongings Slytherin students had left behind in their rush to get outside. Her explorations brought her to an arched doorway with a winding, upward-sloping passage beyond it, and she paused, whiskers twitching. 

_That must be the way to their dormitories_, she mused. She'd noticed it before, but never had the opportunity to explore it.

At first the doorway made only a slight impression on her. Slowly, though, she began to realize something very important: Tom lived in there. If he had anything to hide, that was surely where he kept it.

And she was here, alone, with no one to stop her from walking in and finding whatever there was to find.

Had there ever in all the history of time been a more perfect opportunity?

_No! I can't. I decided to let it all go, and I have. Everything is getting better now. If I start chasing after him again, who knows what will happen?_ But even as she admonished herself, she was taking the first steps into the passage. All her newly minted resolve counted for nothing in the face of those months and months of conditioning to get Tom at any cost.

_I'll only look, that's all. Only a little. And if I don't find anything, I'll forget all about it. I swear I will. I swear on my father's grave._

She followed the curves around and up, checking the plaque on each door to see whose it was, until she came to a small, private room at the very top. It had no plaque, but this dormitory was arranged in much the same way as the Gryffindor one, and that meant the room was very likely reserved for the Head Boy or Girl to use during years when that lucky person came from Slytherin. 

Since she needed her hands now, she transformed back to human form and then turned the brass knob. The door opened easily, as she had known it would. No student, even the Head Boy, was allowed to lock a dormitory door unless the castle itself was under siege. 

_I'm only going to look_, she thought again. Her heart didn't think much of that reassurance. It was racing almost painfully, as if she'd run all the way up from the common room. Steeling herself, she pushed the door farther open and went inside.

She hadn't been anticipating sunlight, but that was what greeted her. Apparently, this room was right at the point where the ground floor ended and the dungeons began, and it had a window – narrow, barred and set high in the wall, but a window all the same. A large glass tank had been set on a nearby table, where the sun's slanting rays could warm its inhabitant: a slender, banded green snake perhaps a foot and a half long. 

The snake seemed to be sleeping, coiled up loosely beside a dead branch someone had thoughtfully provided for its comfort. But when Minerva stepped farther into the room, it raised its head slightly, startled, and let its lidless black gaze rest on her. A brief shiver passed through her. She hated snakes. They looked slimy, even though she knew they weren't. 

"Don't mind me, I won't be a moment," she said to it. "Just having a look around. You go right back to your nap." It flicked its forked tongue out one – two – three times, perhaps trying to decide if she smelled more like cat or human, then laid its head back on its body again. She noticed it kept its eyes open, though.

There were books and papers spread out all over the desk, as if whoever lived here had been interrupted in the middle of studying. Minerva looked through them quickly and confirmed that this was, indeed, Tom's room, but saw nothing of interest, except that he'd written down the steps for transfiguring a stone figure into a live one incorrectly. Oh well. He would have to answer to Albus for it, not her.

Next she moved to a trunk that stood at the foot of the green-curtained bed. It was locked – no surprise in that – so she tried a few opening spells, starting with a simple Alohomora and working her way up from there. The third spell popped the latch open.

She reached for it, and stopped suddenly, her hand just an inch or two away. The last thing she had expected was to feel guilty about rifling through his personal belongings. Somehow, though, she did. But why should she care about invading his privacy? He'd invaded hers – had invaded her very person, for that matter. He had no right to expect any different treatment for himself.

With that in mind, Minerva flung back the lid of the trunk and started investigating. It was only half full; most of Tom's clothes were hanging up in the wardrobe. But his dress robes were there (a heavy, rich black material – where had a scholarship student gotten the money for such finery?), as were a few Muggle-style garments and a spare cloak, all neatly folded, and a book she recognized from her father's collection: _The Prince_, by Niccolo Machiavelli. 

Beneath these things lay a rectangular wooden casket with brass fittings. Its lock was more firmly enchanted than the trunk's had been, and Minerva had to work at it for a long time before she finally figured it out. When open, the box smelled of something dry and vaguely spicy, like sandalwood. The top layer of its contents consisted of folded notes that had passed between Tom and his friends. _Meet me in the library before dinner. Did you finish the homework yet? Look at Wulfstan next time he turns round from the chalkboard – his fly's undone._ Nothing that students didn't write every day, or that she hadn't written herself as a student. Professor Wulfstan had forgotten to button up at least twice a week even then.

The box also held a few photographs, some magic and some Muggle. In the magic ones, Tom was surrounded by other students, smiling the cool smile he was famous for. Most of the Muggle ones were very old shots of stone-faced people in itchy-looking clothes. 

_Interesting_, Minerva thought, and plunged her hand underneath the remaining pictures as if she were reaching into a grab bag. She pulled out a small glass ball – a Remembrall – and put it to one side. Again, she wondered how Tom could afford to own such an object. They were very expensive. She'd gotten one as a gift from Dumbledore when she'd finished school, and had been simultaneously delighted and embarrassed that he'd spent so much on her. 

On her next foray, her exploring fingers touched something soft and silky and almost alive-feeling, and she pulled back with a startled exclamation, thinking for a minute that it was a rodent. But nothing moved or squeaked, and she realized that what she had felt hadn't been fur, but hair. It was a horrid sensation either way. Why should there be hair in there at all? she wondered. People had made mementoes out of their dead relatives' hair once – her mother had owned an heirloom locket with some of her great-grandfather's inside it – but that had gone out of fashion forty years ago at least.

As she stood there pondering this and trying to work up the nerve to stick her hand back in, she heard a sound that sent ice dripping down her spine. There were booted footsteps out in the corridor. She could hear them because the door was still partly open. And they were coming closer.

_To be continued …_

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I'm going to do author's notes in the next chapter because this one is coming so soon after the last. Until then, thanks to everyone who's reviewed! Next chapter will be up in a few days, a week at most.


	20. Snap Of The Trap

**Disclaimer:** The usual.

**Chapter 21**: Snap Of The Trap

For a split second, Minerva stood rooted to the spot with one trembling hand still extended toward the open box. She'd been jerked back to childhood, to nights of lying awake in the dark, unable to move or call out, weeping in silent terror as imaginary hags and ogres approached her bedroom.

_This is worse. This monster is real._ _He's real, he's coming, he's RIGHT OUTSIDE_.

The thought got her moving again. There was no time to reach for her wand, but she was desperate enough to try a spell anyway. 

"_Reparo_!" she whispered urgently, concentrating as hard as she could on her magic, trying to funnel it through her fingertips the way she would have through her wand. To her intense relief, the contents of the box jumped back into position. She picked it up to return it to the trunk – 

"I would ask what you're doing," Tom said from the doorway, "if it weren't so incredibly obvious."

She didn't turn. It seemed pointless. He would come to her. In the interim, she pulled herself up straight to meet him with as much authority as she could.

He took his sweet time about crossing the room, almost strolling, from the sound of his steps – approaching so slowly, in fact, that she could feel his presence before he actually arrived. Her eyes were locked on the bed in front of her, her thoughts full of the image of him simply pushing her down on it and assaulting her again, and she somehow being unable to stop him. But that wasn't going to happen. She was conscious this time, in control of herself. If he touched her, she would change form and claw him to bleeding shreds.

He didn't, of course. He'd caught her red-handed where she wasn't supposed to be. Even a boy much less intelligent than Tom would have realized that he had gotten the advantage over her without needing to lift a finger.

When he reached her side, she finally looked at him, defiantly, but (she hoped) without defensiveness. 

"I'm investigating," she said. "As I was asked to do."

"Yes," said Tom. "I see that. I do remember Dippet and Dumbledore asking you to investigate and telling me to help you. But you know, I don't remember them giving you special permission to come into my room, or to go through my things. Perhaps that's because they didn't. Or did they? In a meeting I wasn't invited to?"

There was no way for Minerva to answer this honestly or to lie convincingly. All she could do was stand there. A slow, soft smile spread across his face as he registered her discomfiture. Unlike his usual smile, it had real emotion in it. She thought that emotion might be triumph.

"So since you're not here on their instructions," he went on, "then why _are_ you here? Ah, I've got it! You changed your mind and decided you wanted to talk after all, but in a better place, where we wouldn't be interrupted. And you thought you'd just look around while you were waiting for me. That's all right. I can forgive you for that. 

He leaned a little closer to her, warm breath stirring the loose wisps of hair around her face. "We haven't really talked in a long time, have we? It's been difficult with you being on staff now. But you can tell me anything, Miss McGonagall – Minerva. Even if it's private. Or intimate."

"Intimate?" she repeated thickly. Could he be trying to suggest – oh, no, but surely even he wouldn't –

"I've seen you watching me, of course," he said. "Oh, don't worry, I'm sure no one else has. Your secret's safe. I can see why you wouldn't want anyone to know you had – what's the right term? – _inappropriate_ feelings for a student?

The meaning of his words sank in on her gradually, but no less powerfully for all that. They left her nearly revolted enough to vomit. She'd felt this way before, on another bright day in another dormitory room. The sun had slanted through the windows just the same way, and she'd been as sick and frightened and angry as she was now. It wasn't right, she thought suddenly, that moments like these could take place under brilliant sunlight. Beautiful days should be reserved for beautiful things. 

Tom stepped around her, sat down on the edge of his bed and patted the spot next to him, indicating that she should sit with him. When she recoiled, he laughed.

"Shy? Whatever for, when you sneaked around after me for so long? If it's any comfort, you were quite good at it. I didn't realize till I saw you transform that you'd been following me in your other shape as well. I thought there was just a plague of tabby cats in the castle. I'm really flattered that you'd go to so much trouble just to be near me. Though I'm not sure why you stopped. You certainly didn't stop staring every time I passed by."

"You know very well why I was following you!" Minerva said through clenched teeth. "It's got nothing to do with inappropriate feelings. How dare you even suggest it?"

"I can't imagine what else it could be," said Tom blandly.

"Oh, you can't, can you?" Fury suddenly boiled up in her, and she deliberately dropped his box on the floor. The muffled sound of shattering glass came from inside.

"Now you've broken my Remembrall," he said. "How will I get to my exams on time?"

"The hell with your Remembrall!" she all but shouted. "When I tell the Headmaster what you've said to me, your exams will be the least of your problems!" 

"You won't tell the Headmaster anything," Tom said. Now his smile was gone. His face was dead straight, immobile as a tombstone. "You and I are going to reach an understanding. There's only a week left in the term, and I'd prefer to spend it without your nose in my business – either your wet little cat nose or your pointy little human one. So here's the deal: You stay out of my room, and I won't mention to anyone that you were here, fondling my personal possessions because you have some sort of obsession with me."

"I've done nothing to be ashamed of," Minerva said coldly. "A few drops of Veritaserum will confirm that – along with other things you might prefer to keep secret."

She expected him to flinch at that, but he only shook his head.

"No Veritaserum," he said. "Haven't you heard? The stuff's become rarer than dragons' teeth lately. The Ministry's issued a policy stating that it's not to be used for anything other than interrogating Grindelwald's supporters. And if you're thinking of suggesting that I'm one of those, it won't work. Of course, you wouldn't do that anyhow. You're not the type to make false accusations, are you?"

"Why should I think it would be a false accusation? I wouldn't put anything past you. I expect you'd volunteer to help catch other people just to get suspicion off yourself."

"I might," Tom said, "but I didn't. I swear to you that I am not involved with Grindelwald in any way – let's just say that if one man's going to run the world, he and I have different ideas about who that man ought to be. You've got no evidence against me, because there isn't any to get."

On the last words, he stood up. It was all she could do not to back away a step – or to turn and run, for that matter.

"Listen to me, Minerva," he said, his voice as soft and caressing as she imagined a lover's would be. He moved closer to her, never quite touching her, but coming so near that the fine hairs on her arms and the nape of her neck bristled in response. "Think about it. I'll be doing you a favor by not telling anyone you were following me before, or that you were here today. You're supposed to be such a clever thing – surely you can see what effect it would have on your career to even be accused of stalking one of your students. Do you think the mummies and daddies of Hogwarts' finest would want an unbalanced slut of a girl teaching their sons? Or their daughters, for that matter?"

All the righteous indignation she'd been relying on left her at that instant, and she started to shake again. He was correct. Absolutely correct. Even if Dumbledore and Dippet didn't believe it of her, the rumors and scandal would be enough to make the regents dismiss her. Yes, she could take Bella's suggestion of working for the Ministry, but she would never be able to return to teaching. She couldn't bear to see that avenue closed to her forever.

_All the work. All the misery. Not sleeping. Not eating. Nearly getting killed. I thought I was setting him up, and I was only building a case against myself. Even if I said that I'd been following him because he'd raped me, I still wouldn't be able to offer any real proof, even after all this time. And he could say – oh, my Lord, he could say that I'd slept with him out of my own free will, and then tried to frame him after he broke things off with me. We were both students then. No rules against us having a relationship. _

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" Tom asked. She nodded, feeling tears beginning to well up. "No need to cry over it. Just admit you were wrong and move on."

"I'm not wrong," she whispered, and he shrugged.

"Don't admit it, then. It makes no difference to me. Now, are you going to mind your own business until exams are over? All this distraction will lower my marks, and I don't want that. I've worked much too hard."

"You're not the only one who's worked hard," said Minerva bitterly. The first tears spilled down her cheeks. She didn't even try to brush them away.

"Oh, please. Spare me the tale of your troubles. You don't know what it is to really struggle. You've had old Dumbledore backing you up for years. I've had no one. Everything I've achieved, I've achieved on my own – and no one is going to take it away from me, Minerva. Not you, or anyone else. You have a good position here, Dippet and the regents trust you, you're helping out the Ministry. Be content with all that." He stooped, picked up his fallen box, straightened up again.

"It's time for you to go. There are people out in the common room now – I passed them on my way in. You'd better do your spying so you'll have something to report. Wait for someone to leave and follow them when you're through. I've got things to take care of."

She looked into his eyes and saw that he was serious. And more than that, she saw that she'd been wrong about him in one way, if no other. She'd always thought him a little mad, with his amused air and his half-teasing, half-threatening speech. But there was no madness in him. He was utterly, coldly sane and calculating. 

The realization disturbed her more than anything else that had passed between them since he'd come into the room. Desperate to get away, she transformed and bolted through the door and down the passage, leaving him behind.

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After Minerva had left, Tom closed his eyes tightly for a minute and tried to calm down. He hadn't been frightened in ages, not since he'd first started studying the Dark Arts and seen some of the things one had to do to be really successful at them. That encounter had been too close for him to feel truly sanguine about it, though. Not because she'd had any evidence against him, but because she'd almost gotten it.

He put his box on the bed, opened it and dug down through the various layers till he found what he was looking for – the lock of hair he'd taken from her two years ago, while she'd been under the influence of his potion. It had been stupid of him to keep it this long, but he'd so enjoyed having it as a reminder of their time together. He'd always found the feel of it quite arousing. But he was on his way to bigger and better things, and it would be best to just get rid of this link to his past now. He fetched his wand from the desk, walked to the center of the room, tossed the hair up and said "_Incendio_!"

Only ashes drifted down to land softly on the floor.

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A/N: Well, I finished this chapter a lot sooner than I expected to. Just one more to go after this one (two if you count the epilogue). Now, on to the actual notes. Wheeee! (I'm consolidating comments for those wonderful people who reviewed twice.)

Ozma: That something-wicked-this-way-comes atmosphere was exactly what I was aiming for. And I think the poor girl got even more royally messed over by Tom in this chapter than she did all the way back at the beginning. Re: cat-Minerva sneaking up on Albus – that scene was lots of fun to write. Even someone as straitlaced as Minerva must have a bit of playfulness in her somewhere!

Strange One: Wow, I was so thrilled by your comments. There are stories out there that make me feel that involved, too, and it's so much fun to read them that I'm glad I can give a little of that feeling to other readers. And I'm also happy to hear that I've managed to create a strong characterization for Minerva. She's very different from me, so it's not always easy to imagine what she would think/do about something.

Bibphile: Thanks! I hope you enjoyed this part, too. I think Minerva's the sort of person who would notice errors everywhere. God help the man who tries to write her a love letter and misspells a word.

MK: Thanks! I had the Mission Impossible theme stuck in my head for quite a while after I read what you wrote. =)

Arcee: Thanks! We'll see if they end up together. Even if they don't, they'll always have a very rewarding friendship.

Faith Accompli: Ahhh – more compliments that give me warm, fuzzy feelings. I was very honored by everything you said. Don't feel bad about not reviewing earlier. I'm guilty of the same crime myself – I read the first two chapters of your new Tom/Ginny story and loved them, but haven't reviewed yet. I promise to get on the ball by the time your next chapter comes out. (Which I hope will be very soon.)


	21. June Again

**Chapter 22**: June Again

A lithe tabby cat sat on the roof of Hogsmeade station, paws tucked beneath her chest, watching the flurry of activity below. Her keen golden eyes scanned the crowd as if looking for one particular person.

She saw the youngest students taking their seats inside the train, looking eager to go home and relieved that they'd survived their first year. She saw the newly released seventh-years hugging each other and crying, vowing to stay in touch forever. (_That'll last about six months_, she thought with wry amusement.) She saw everyone in between talking excitedly about the year just past, their grand holiday plans, and the year to come. And finally, she saw him – a tall, handsome, dark-haired boy conferring in low, secretive tones with a group of his friends. He'd already exchanged his robes for Muggle clothes, and his entire aspect held a sense of finality, as if he were saying _I am done with this place and everything in it_.

Stealthily, the cat crept to the edge of the roof and peered over for a better look. The June sun beat down on the slates, and she panted with the heat, but didn't abandon her post even when the boy turned his back on his companions and boarded the train. Nor did she move as the porters finished loading the trunks and took the steps away from the platform. 

With a shrill whistle and a puff of steam, the train began to move away, and the cat watched it go, growing smaller and smaller till it was just a speck in the distance. Then even that disappeared.

_Well, that's that_, thought Minerva. _He's gone, and now no one but we two will ever know the truth about him. Hero indeed! _ She snorted and shook herself all over. 

Slytherin had won the House Cup at the previous night's feast, largely thanks to points Tom had earned over the course of the year. In his presentation speech, Dippet had praised his Head Boy so lavishly that it seemed he was going to end by proposing marriage. Tom was the ideal that every Hogwarts student should aspire to, he'd said. The other children would do well to model themselves after him. And on and on, till Minerva, who'd been sitting with hot cheeks and tear-filled eyes through the entire thing, longed to jump up and run through the hall screaming.

At last, Dumbledore had nudged her gently and asked why she wasn't eating, and she'd forced down some food to please him. It hadn't been a good idea – she'd left the hall ill with nerves and made it halfway to her room before veering into the nearest bathroom, which happened to be the one Moaning Myrtle haunted, and throwing everything up.

That would have been bad enough. But Myrtle, who had recently recovered the power of speech and was now using it nonstop to express her feelings about being dead, had floated over her shoulder the entire time, making astute remarks like "Sick, are you?" and "The food they serve here must have gotten worse since I died – of course, I'd be grateful to be able to eat anything at all." Still kneeling on the floor, shaking and sweating, Minerva had finally managed to gasp out that she wanted to be left alone. Myrtle had then drifted away in a shower of noisy, insubstantial tears.

On that pleasant note, Minerva had retired to bed and lain awake for hours, wondering what to do. _Two years gone and I'm still wondering that_, she'd thought. _I should have gotten smarter by now_.

And now it was over, all of it. Tom had gone, and she couldn't help feeling relieved that at least she would see him no more. Soon Dumbledore would be coming to join her – he was leaving on another intelligence mission, this time to France, and Bella had pulled strings to get her sent along, offering the reasonable explanation that her Animagus abilities might come in handy. The older woman hadn't stopped trying to convince her to apply for that Ministry job, even after Minerva had said she intended to stay at Hogwarts. The threat of losing her teaching career had made her realize how much it really meant to her. Still, as a temporary diversion, the trip to France sounded exciting.

As she considered all this, Dumbledore appeared with a pop and looked around. He'd altered his appearance for the purposes of his assignment, as he was both distinctive-looking and well-known within the magical community. His hair had been darkened and trimmed away to almost nothing, and his long, crooked nose straightened. Only his eyes were the same, though they sparkled behind round spectacles instead of the usual half-moons. 

"Come down, Tabby," he called to her. She leapt from the upper level of the roof to the station overhang and then to the ground, landing lightly and shifting back to her human form as she did.

"And to think you once called _me_ a show-off," Dumbledore said. He inspected her. "You look very nice."

"Thank you," Minerva said, looking down at her Muggle costume of red floral print dress and white ankle-strap shoes. In the spirit of disguise, she'd cut her hair to shoulder length that morning and curled the ends neatly under. It was a style she'd found in a magazine she'd confiscated from one of her students. She was even trying out lipstick for the first time. She felt rather conspicuous and exposed, but oddly pretty.

"What were you doing up there?" he asked.

"Just thinking," she said. "About the past – and the future."

"You're too young to be dwelling on the past already," he said. He reached to pull a piece of her newly shortened hair, but stopped at the last minute and smoothed it instead. "It's all future for you."

Minerva looked in the direction the train had gone. There was nothing to see now but lush green hills and sunshine.

"Yes …" she said. "Yes, I suppose you're right. And if there were something in the past … something you regretted … the best thing to do would be to let it go, wouldn't it? If there were nothing you could do to change it?" 

She glanced at him, and saw him watching her very strangely.

"Is there something you want to tell me, Minerva?" he asked, suddenly all seriousness.

"No," she said. "Nothing worth mentioning. We should go. They'll be waiting for us with the Portkey."

As they walked away, Dumbledore saw his companion turn twice to look at the empty summer landscape behind them.

_Something's still troubling her_, he thought. _Should I ask_? But then she faced forward again, and looking at the determined set of her jaw, he decided not to. Whatever it was, she could handle it. She would tell him when she was ready. All she needed was time.

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A/N: And that's the end. For now, anyway. As always, thanks so much to all of you for reviewing. Without your encouragement, I would've given up chapters and chapters ago. =)

I'll be starting the sequel soon, but I have to do some more thinking about it first. I'm also considering another sequel about Minerva and Albus' anti-Grindelwald efforts. (And I really need to work on "Twists And Turns." It's been my neglected stepchild for too long.)

On to the notes:

Strange One: I'm glad you liked this chapter. (I had to come through with some evil Tom before I wrapped things up.) Yes, I think Tom might have indulged himself in a relationship for a while, if only for the sexual component, as long as Minerva didn't get in the way of his various activities. But I also think he's the type who enjoys force and coercion, and he'd quickly grow bored with what was offered to him freely. In a weird way, she was probably better off being attacked by him than she would have been if she'd fallen in love with him, since he would have abandoned her and broken her heart in the end anyway.

Flowerlily99: Thanks for reading! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Mayfair: That is incredibly flattering! I sometimes have trouble separating the "real" canon from things I've read in fanfic too – not to mention my own imaginings. Dumbledore _does_ have a resolve of steel. It's a rare older man who would turn down a chance at a twenty-year-old girl who's desperately in love with him, especially if she's even halfway attractive. She jumped off his lap too quickly for him to be very tempted at the moment, but I'm sure he thought about it later, when he went to bed. (And then cursed himself for a dirty old man. He's too noble for his own good.)

I'm sad to see this story finished as well. I almost waited to post this chapter so I could put it off a little longer, but it's been sitting here in my computer for so long that I couldn't stand not to. =)

Ozma: I _almost_ had him keep the lock of hair – I kept thinking that maybe he could use it later to get some sort of awful power over her – but in the end, I just didn't want him to have it any more. The poor girl needed a break. I shudder to think of how he might have been using it during the two years he had it, anyway. Thanks for all the nice compliments! They mean a lot coming from a writer I admire so much. Speaking of which, I'm about to go and re-read the latest chapter of "To Save A Squib." (Public service announcement: Everyone read Ozma's Argus Filch series – it's amazing! You'll want to hug the cranky old Squib by the time you're finished.)

Well, as someone once said, that's all she wrote. I'll do one last chapter of author's notes in a couple of days. And I'll be updating "Twists And Turns" this weekend. Thank you all for reading!


	22. Author's Notes

**Author's Notes:**

**Face of Evil**: Thank you! It's not really the end … only a hiatus. Minerva and Albus will be back very soon.

**Faith Accompli: **

*blush* Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

I love doing those cat-moments. Cats are such quirky, elegant creatures. I really miss having them in the house (stupid no-pets clause in my lease), and writing about one is like vicariously having one for a while.

**Ryven:** Thanks! I love reading about romantic tension too – more than romantic consummation, I think. Not that that prevents me from reading well-written smut when I happen across some, LOL.

**bibphile:** Thanks! Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that Minerva's spying could be taken the wrong way, and I knew Tom would use that to his advantage if he got the chance. I'm not sure if there were anti-stalking laws in the 1940s, but considering the sexist culture of the day, I think people would be all too ready to believe that Minerva was either a spurned girlfriend trying to get revenge or a foolish young teacher obsessed with a handsome student. As for the rape part of it, those were the days when victims were told they'd been asking for it, so no help there.

**Ozma: "**Dead on perfect!" Hee hee! I'm strangely fond of Myrtle. (I actually did a scene from her POV for this story, but I never could find a way to fit it in.) Thank you again for all the great feedback. And thanks for (indirectly) giving me the idea of responding to reviews. I really enjoy interacting with people this way.

**MK:** I'm so glad you liked this story. I think you're my most faithful reader. I appreciate that more than I can say. Thank you. =)

**The Strange One:** Thank you! I really wanted to give the ending a coming-full-circle feeling. (There are actually quite a lot of references – some obvious and some more oblique – in the last three chapters to things or events from the first three.) Regarding sequels, see below.

**whisper:** Thanks! Yes, the end did come very quickly. Once I got over the hump at chapter 18, I couldn't seem to stop! I will definitely continue with one sequel or another, and I want to try a longer humor piece too – I've never done one that's more than a single chapter.

**Marauder-girl:** Thank you so much! 

**Veruka:** I secretly like to see the villain triumph too. ;-) I have to say, keeping things suspenseful was one of the hardest parts of writing this story, because everyone knew he was going to get away with it. Thank you so much for all the lovely compliments. (BTW, I'm waiting eagerly for the next installments of *your* stories!)

What about sequels? I have a couple in mind. The first one is the one I intended to write when I finished "Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc." It would tell the story of the last few days of the Potters' lives, including the Fidelius charm and their deaths, but from Minerva and Dumbledore's POVs. Tom would be in it, but as Voldemort, not as Tom. The other one would take place right after the end of "June Week" and cover what happens when M. and D. go to gather information on Grindelwald. No Tom in that one. But I've become strangely attached to young Master Riddle, and I'd like to feature him in another story, possibly from his POV. If only I could decide what to write first …


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